How to make a tournament bracket
Making a bracket takes about ten seconds:
- Type or paste your teams or players, one per line.
- Leave them in ranked order to seed the bracket, or tick Shuffle for a random draw.
- Hit Generate bracket — the single-elimination bracket lays out instantly.
- Click the winner of each matchup to advance them round by round.
- Reach the final and the champion is crowned. Print it or copy the results.
No Excel formulas, no Google Sheets template and no drawing lines by hand — the bracket generator builds every round for you.
Brackets for any number of teams — 4, 6, 8, 16 or 32
You do not need a perfect power of two. Drop in any count and the bracket rounds up to the next size — 4, 8, 16 or 32 — and gives the extra top seeds a bye through the first round. So a 6-team single-elimination bracket, a 5-team bracket, a 7-team bracket or a 12-team bracket all work with no empty matchups and never a bye-versus-bye.
Byes go to the top seeds, exactly as a real seeded tournament does, so the strongest entries get the shortest path and the draw stays fair.
How does a tournament bracket work?
A single-elimination bracket is a knockout: lose once and you are out. Each matchup sends one winner up to the next round — quarterfinals into semifinals into the final — until one entry is left standing as champion. Seeding decides who meets whom, and byes let an odd-sized field fit a clean bracket. This maker handles single elimination; double elimination, where a first loss drops you into a losers' bracket, is a different format and is not built in.
Print, save or share your bracket
Hit Print to send a clean printable bracket to paper or save it as a PDF — leave the winners blank to fill in by hand at a watch party, or print it fully filled once every match is decided. Copy grabs the whole bracket as text for a group chat. Everything runs in your browser, so nothing is uploaded.
A bracket maker for any tournament
Use it as an NFL, NBA, NCAA March Madness, World Cup or NHL bracket maker, an esports or gaming ladder, a fantasy playoff, an office pool, a class competition or a game-night knockout. Need entrants first? Draw them with the random team generator, or settle a favourites debate in a tier list and bracket the top picks.