Tournament Planning Sheet

The arithmetic

Bracket size

next power of 2 at or above entrants

Byes

bracket size − entrants

Rounds

how many halvings to reach 1

Matches

entrants − 1, ALWAYS

First-round matches

entrants − bracket size ÷ 2

Third-place match

adds exactly 1

Round-robin instead

N x (N−1) ÷ 2 — grows as the square

Double elimination

roughly double the matches

⚠ The time figure

a FLOOR — rounds are serial

Common field sizes

8 entrants

bracket 8, 0 byes, 3 rounds, 7 matches

12 entrants

bracket 16, 4 byes, 4 rounds, 11 matches

16 entrants

bracket 16, 0 byes, 4 rounds, 15 matches

24 entrants

bracket 32, 8 byes, 5 rounds, 23 matches

32 entrants

bracket 32, 0 byes, 5 rounds, 31 matches

64 entrants

bracket 64, 0 byes, 6 rounds, 63 matches

This event

Event and date

Venue until

Entrants

BRACKET SIZE

BYES

ROUNDS

MATCHES

First-round matches

Match length

Stations

MINIMUM TIME

Slack allowed

Bye policy

Before the draw

• Entry list final - late entries change the bracket size
• Bye policy decided AND announced before drawing
• Match length includes changeover, not just play
• Slack added on top of the minimum time
• Venue end time checked against the floor plus slack
• Final scheduled knowing it cannot be parallelised
• Third-place match decided early - it affects who must stay
• Format confirmed - single, double or round-robin

Entrants minus one, always

Every match eliminates exactly one person and everyone but the winner must be eliminated. So the match count is fixed the moment you know how many turned up - before any bracket is drawn, before any seeding, regardless of byes. It is the number to budget the whole event from.

Parallelism stops helping at the end

Early rounds spread across every station; the semi-finals use two and the final uses one. So the last rounds run at fixed length however much capacity you have - which is exactly when an overrunning event most needs to catch up and cannot. Plan the tail of the day as serial.