Unit 2 Notes:

Drawing Single Elimination Tournament Brackets
also see:  Recreational Sport Management by Mull, Bayless,  & Jamieson, pp. 119-126

When drawing tournament brackets, it is important to FIRST have all of the teams or participants registered in your tournament.  It is difficult to place teams in the tournament draw after you have already scheduled your tournament, so you should make sure that all team entries have been received before scheduling your tournament.  Remember, single elimination tournaments are based on powers of 2, so your tournament bracket should be balanced in such a way that from the second round through the final round, the same number of teams will be in the upper half of the bracket as will be in the lower half of the bracket.  This may not be true for the first round, due to the possible presence of bye games in the first round. 

When you are ready to draw your tournament bracket, you may choose to draw and "implied bye" bracket or an "explicit bye" bracket.  Implied bye games are not indicated on the tournament bracket....rather, blank spaces replace first round bye games and only second round games appear.  Explicit bye brackets show all bye games by placing the word "bye" or drawing an "x" through the bye game.  For the purposes of this course, it is easier to draw explicit bye brackets, to more easily accommodate seeding and placing of bye games.  We will focus on this type of bracket from here on out.

How to draw/choose the tournament bracket:

Begin by taking the number of teams you have in your tournament....lets say 7.  Always use the bracket format for the NEXT HIGHEST power of two...in our case here, you would use an 8 team bracket.  If you had 12 teams in your tournament, you would use a 16 team bracket, if you had 23 teams in your tournament, you would use a 32 team bracket, etc.  You can see examples of different sized brackets on pages  122-123 in RSM text.

After you choose your bracket, you must determine your tournament SEEDS.  Remember, the easiest way to determine seeds is to look at past performance or team's ability.  If you do not know this information, random seeding is possible.  STOP, make sure you review the example of how to seed a single elimination tournament bracket by referring to page 122-123 in RSM text.

After drawing the bracket and determining your seeds, you must place your BYE games.  The number of BYE games is equal to the number of teams in your tournament subtracted from the next highest power of 2 (or in this case, the size of the bracket you initially drew).  In our example, we have 7 teams in our tournament.  The next highest power of 2 is 8, so 8-7 =1, giving us 1 bye game.  Go down your tournament bracket and draw a line through every game that is represented by a seed higher than 7.  In our example, you would draw a line through the game matchup 1 vs. 8, because we only have 7 teams in the tournament.

Once you have completed placing your bye games, you are ready to schedule your tournament games!