A bye is an automatic advance when the field is not a power of two. If you enter 6 participants, the bracket fills to 8 by adding two "— BYE —" slots, and the two participants paired with byes start in the semifinals.

How many participants are supported?

Two to 64. That covers everything from a quick four-team office tournament up to a 64-seed knockout. Above 64 the tool refuses to render to keep the UI usable.

Can I seed participants in a specific order?

Yes — pairings follow the order you type them. Put your top seeds first if you want them to meet weaker opponents in round 1, or interleave seeds to spread strong players across the bracket.

Does it support double-elimination or round robin?

Not in this version — single-elimination only. Losers drop out immediately and the bracket halves each round.

Where does the bracket live?

In your browser tab. Refreshing clears the data; export the Markdown to keep a copy or paste it into your tournament page.

Tournament Bracket Generator

Generate a single-elimination tournament bracket from a participant list with automatic byes.

Written by Golam Rabbani, Founder & Lead Engineer

This interactive tool requires JavaScript. Read the formula and worked example below; you can compute the result by hand.

How to use this tournament bracket generator

Type a tournament name in the top field.
Enter participants one per line — 2 to 64 entries are supported.
Click Generate Bracket. If the count is not a power of two, "— BYE —" placeholders are added automatically to round up.
Read the bracket left-to-right; each subsequent column is the winners of the previous round.
Click Copy Markdown to share the bracket as a list of matches per round.

About this tournament bracket generator

A single-elimination bracket pairs participants into matches; the winner of each match advances to the next round, and the loser is eliminated. With N entrants, the bracket fills to the next power of two (4, 8, 16, 32, or 64) by adding "— BYE —" slots — a bye gives the matched participant an automatic advance to the next round.

This tool computes the bracket entirely client-side. Participants are taken in the order you entered them, paired position-by-position into round 1, then each subsequent round is built from "Winner R{round}M{match}" placeholders. Byes are resolved at generation time: if one side of a match is a bye, the other side's name is propagated to the next round, so you do not see a phantom "Winner" line where someone got a bye.

For example, enter "Alice, Bob, Carol, Dave, Erin, Frank, Greta, Hank" (eight names) with the tournament named "Spring Cup". The bracket builds three rounds — Quarterfinals (Alice vs Bob, Carol vs Dave, Erin vs Frank, Greta vs Hank), Semifinals (Winner R1M1 vs Winner R1M2, Winner R1M3 vs Winner R1M4), and Final. The Markdown output lists each round as an H2 with one bullet per match, ready to paste into a tournament page.

FAQ

What is a bye?: A bye is an automatic advance when the field is not a power of two. If you enter 6 participants, the bracket fills to 8 by adding two "— BYE —" slots, and the two participants paired with byes start in the semifinals.
How many participants are supported?: Two to 64. That covers everything from a quick four-team office tournament up to a 64-seed knockout. Above 64 the tool refuses to render to keep the UI usable.
Can I seed participants in a specific order?: Yes — pairings follow the order you type them. Put your top seeds first if you want them to meet weaker opponents in round 1, or interleave seeds to spread strong players across the bracket.
Does it support double-elimination or round robin?: Not in this version — single-elimination only. Losers drop out immediately and the bracket halves each round.
Where does the bracket live?: In your browser tab. Refreshing clears the data; export the Markdown to keep a copy or paste it into your tournament page.