Understanding the Different Bracket Types

A bracket is also called a tournament, and Bracket Ninja provides you with the option for several types of tournaments that you can create on our platform. Here is how you can access them.

PS: It is important to note that the basic version provides you with a Single Elimination bracket type. All other tournament types are available once you upgrade your account to the premium version.

To upgrade, click How to upgrade your account to premium?

Go to Settings of your bracket and choose from any of the drop-down menu from the Bracket Type feature. Here are these:

Single Elimination

A single-elimination, knockout, or sudden death tournament is a type of elimination tournament where the team is out of the tournament if they lose only 1 match to their opponent. There are no second chances. Each winner will then subsequently play with another in the next round, and this will continue till the quarterfinals, semi-finals, and the final where the champion (winner) is declared.

A single Elimination tournament is simple to explain using the following example:

Each participant pits against each other and only one qualifies to play with a winner from the other game until the champion (winner) is chosen.

PS: Only a Single Elimination tournament type is allowed in the free version. All other tournament types are only available in premium versions of Brackets Ninja.

Single Elimination - Voting

Voting is a sub bracket of the Single Elimination tournament which allows users to vote for their favorite participants. It allows you to add participants and let your users (the end user who will be viewing your tournament) vote on their favorite teams. Once users keep voting, the brackets will then, based on the calculated amount of votes, move winners of each game to the next round until there is a final winner or a champion. This is a feature named Automatic winners that you need to turn on by yourself.

We have a whole new dedicated tutorial on how to enable a voting bracket in Brackets Ninja.
Here’s the link to it.

Single Elimination - Predictions (Pick'em)

Not much different than voting, but here your users will be able to submit predictions and create their own brackets based on yours instead of voting. Predictions allow your users to predict which teams would win each game. The user with the most accurate predictions could be qualified for some prizes.

More on How to enable a prediction bracket, here.

Double Elimination

In a double-elimination tournament, the team has 2 chances. Even if they lose one match, they still have a chance to proceed with the tournament provided that they do not lose another one. If they lose both matches, they are eliminated from the tournament.

At times, the double-elimination tournament has some benefits over the single-elimination format, where the 3rd and 4th places can be determined without matches of 2 teams that have already been eliminated from the tournament.

Here is how a double-elimination tournament with 8 participants looks like. The participants who lost one game also have a chance to stay in the tournament as they will get two chances to prove themselves. All losers play against each other and proceed to the finals with the winners. 

Double Elimination - Voting

Nothing different than the previous one, except we have a detailed and dedicated tutorial on starting a voting bracket here.

Double Elimination - Predictions

Nothing different than the previous one, except we have a detailed and dedicated tutorial on starting a predictions bracket here.

March Madness / 2 Sided Bracket

A March Madness is a type of tournament with a history dating back to the NCAA. Since the tournament was started in March and continued till April, it is called March Madness. Usually, there are 68 teams playing in three weekends.

Luckily with Ninja Brackets, you can have a march madness with minimum participants of just 8 teams. A march madness tournament example can be seen as follows: 

To understand how a March Madness tournament works and its features, we have a dedicate tutorial for it:

How to create and manage a March Madness Tournament

March Madness - Voting

A detailed tutorial on how to start a voting bracket here.

March Madness - Predictions

A detailed tutorial on how to start a predictions bracket here.

Round Robin

A Round Robin tournament is where every participant plays with all other contestants in turns and the winner is the one with the most wins throughout the tournament. A round robin tournament in ninja brackets would look like this: