Tournament Bracket Forms

Double Elimination, Byes seeding, Balanced Losers Bracket (last updated 5/13/1999)

Formatted for printing on 8 1/2" X 11" Paper

Brackets last updated 9/5/1999 (error on 32-player bracket corrected)

click here or title bar for Top of Foosball Heaven

These forms are provided courtesy of Foosball Heaven and ZAPP! Video Game Arcade of Honolulu, HI. Feel free to distribute the forms, and please don't modify them.


If the bracket doesn't load, try the "Reload" button on your browser, or look in your Download Manager.
 
tournament8c.pdf (5k)   8 Player Double Elimination Bracket
tournament16c.pdf (5k)  16 Player Double Elimination Bracket
tournament32c.pdf (7k)  32 Player Double Elimination Bracket
tournament32bc.pdf (7k)  32 Player Double Elimination Bracket with illustrative seeding (see Notes below)
 
 
 These files are all Adobe Acrobat 3.0 (.pdf) format files. They should be universally readable and printable. If you don't have Acrobat, go to www.adobe.com to obtain a free copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader for all platforms. It should include a plug-in as well as a standalone application.
 
INSTRUCTIONS:
 
1) Draw names, and insert in order of the numeric seeding, i.e. insert first name into "1", the second name into "2", etc. These seedings jump around the bracket to spread evenly through the bracket, giving earlier draws slightly more favorable placement with respect to Byes.
 
2) Empty seeds are "Byes" (For example if you have only 5 players in an 8-player bracket, 6, 7, and 8 are "Byes). Write in "Bye", and treat as a player who loses *every* match. If Bye plays Fido, Fido wins and Bye loses. (If Bye plays Bye, then Bye wins *and* Bye loses.)
 
3) In the first matches of the bracket, insert winners' names to right, losers' to the left. Subsequently, insert winners to right, and losers from the winners bracket into the indicated slots within the losers bracke. Losers in the losers bracket are eliminated from the tournament, as it is their second loss.
 
4) The winner of the winners bracket and the winner of the losers bracket play for the championship. Since this is double elimination, the winners bracket winner has not yet lost, so can only be eliminated after two consecutive match losses in the championship. In other words, the winners bracket winner must only win a match once to be champion, the losers bracket winner must win matches twice in a row.
 

SUGGESTIONS:
1) Use the smallest bracket you can use, e.g. if you have 12 people use the 16-bracket, not the 32-bracket, for ease of use. However, seeding is organized so that if you use a larger bracket than necessary, it will be as evenly balanced as the smaller brackets.
 
2) Matches may be any format: 1 game only, 2 games out of 3, or 3 games out of 5, in other words, whatever you want.
a) Coin toss determines choice of first serve (more desirable) OR side of table. Teams switch sides after every game.
b) First serve in subsequent games goes to loser of previous game in this match.
c) Of course you are expected to serve to yourself(there is no sure way to prove or enforce a "fair" serve, so that's why). Subsequent serves go to the loser of the previous point ("losers foosers"), so it all evens out. Of course this is standard in all major Rules of Play, e.g. USTSA.
 
3) To expedite long tournaments, losers bracket games are often played as shorter matches, e.g. one sudden death game to 7 points, OR losers bracket=2 out of 3 while winners bracket is 3 out of 5.
 

NOTES on how the brackets are constructed, if you are really that interested:
 
1) The seedings may look different from those you may have seen; however my seedings are probably exactly the same; if you take any "fork" in the bracket and "spin" it around, the tournament is still exactly the same, e.g. Bob vs. Bill = Bill vs. Bob. Also, Winner of (Bob vs Bill) VS Winner of (Richard vs. Robert) is the same as Winner of (Robert vs. Richard) VS Winner of (Bill vs. Bob). And so on.
 
a) These seedings are arranged to give advantage to earlier draws (e.g. 1 earlier than 2) by giving earlier draws the Byes first. In some cases, this may result in an earlier draw playing a tougher opponent at the second level, e.g. In the 8 player bracket, if there are only 5 players, 1, 2, and 3 have Byes, whereas 4 and 5 do not, which sounds fine. However, in the next matches, "1" plays winner of "5 " and "4", which sounds tougher than "2" plays "3", since 1 is plays the better of a pool of two players. However, correcting this effect would grant Byes in an unfair order... in this case player 5 gets seeded in the other half, and is matched up against 2 or 3 (say 3), which means 1, 2, and 4 get Byes, where 3 and 5 do not. I chose to grant the advantage of Byes to draw order (first example) instead.
 
2) If you are really curious about how the seeding is done, it's really clear if you just download Tournament32bc.pdf., instead ot tournament32c.pdf. In this one, the seeds are EXACTLY THE SAME as tournament32c.pdf, however, the brackets are "spun" around so that I've inserted the seeds, beginning with 1 on down at the "highest" point possible in the bracket.
In other words, first I split the bracket in two, and insert 1 in the first half, and 2 in the second. Then I split it into four, and insert 3 and 4 into the remaining two quarters. Then I split it into eight, and insert 5,6,7,8 in the remaining four eighths. Then 9, 10,11,12,13,14,15,16 into the remaining eight sixteenths. Then I work backwards, and match 32 with 1, 31 with 2, 30 with 3, etc., so that if there is only one Bye 1 gets it, if there are two Byes, 1 and 2 get it, etc. This is much clearer in the layout of Tournament32bc.pdf, although Tournament32c.pdf is exactly the same.
 
3) The insertion of losers of the winners bracket into the losers bracket is done to mix up players as much as possible. If you look at the 16-player tournament16c.pdf, you will see that the losers of the top half of second matches (A1 and A2) get inserted into the bottom half, and losers of A3 and A4 get inserted into the top half. This way the losers don't potentially play someone they just played in the first match again. However, the loser of the top half of the THIRD match (Loser of B1) gets inserted into the top half of the losers bracket! This is because the players in the B1 match were the winners of A1 and A2 and remember that the losers of A1 and A2 went into the second half. Therefore, if the loser of B1 also goes into the second half, B1 may potentially play a recent opponent, the odds are 1:2. By inserting the top half loser of B1 into the top half of the losers bracket, this is avoided. At worst, loser of B1 might play an opponent it played it the very first match of the whole tournament, but that's better than playing someone from one match ago, and besides here the chances of a repeat matchup is now 1:4.
 
 
 


Rob's Foosball Heaven


Rob Uyeyama Home
| About Rob | Food and Cooking | Hi End Stereo | Marine Mammals | Acquaintances |