How to Start a Tournament (Publish Bracket)?

Starting a tournament or publishing a bracket are one and the same thing in Brackets Ninja. For the entire tutorial, we will use How to Start a Tournament and explain with examples how to publish every type of bracket. This will give our clients a good idea of using each bracket type since all differ in terms of features.

We believe that by now you have covered all tutorials regarding adding participants, changing the logo for each participant, selecting a winner, etc. These are all important tutorials in order to start a tournament. Before proceeding forward, it is important that once a tournament starts, the bracket type cannot be changed. Hence, create multiple copies either by creating duplicates or creating new brackets for different bracket types before moving on.

Starting a Single Elimination Tournament:

1. To start a tournament, click on Start Tournament at the top right corner of the bracket.
   

2. A popup window will appear. This is going to be important because other than announcing winners and updating game scores, certain features will not work when the tournament is started, such as:

• Changing tournament type (bracket type)
• Adding or removing participants
• Changing games order
• Accepting join requests.
  

If you agree, simply click on Start Tournament and your bracket will be published!

3. Once published, you will not have the option to delete any participant.

4. Now that the tournament is started, it’s important to select the winners by assigning them scores for each game. To do this, head over to Games, and you will see all games available for each round in the second panel. Click on Game 1, and since by default you have already selected the participant, you will not be able to change it. However, you can specify the score of both participants, set a date and time for the game and it will automatically reflect in the bracket. You can see Brazil as the winner:

5. Similarly, choose the dates, time, score, and winner for each game in the quarterfinals, semi-finals, and the final by following steps 1 to 4. Once completed, here is how the entire tournament would look like:
   

6. Each winner of the game is highlighted as bold. When it comes to the final, our valuable clients now have the option of choosing a champion, displayed after the final match. To enable this feature, head over to Settings, scroll all the way down to Visibility and click the Final Winner/Champion feature. You will now see the Champion of the tournament, and in our case, as Croatia:
   

A handy, yet IMPORTANT feature. As always, don’t forget to save changes so that the tournament’s results can be visible to your end-users.