Brackets & seeding

Tournaments (and round-robin + bracket leagues) play out a bracket. This page covers the bracket types, how Skoryd seeds them, and the seed sources you can choose from.

Bracket types

• Single elimination — lose once and you're out.
• Double elimination — a Winners and a Losers bracket; you're out after your second loss. The Grand Final can include a reset game if the Losers-bracket finalist wins the first one.
• Round robin + bracket — a group stage seeds players/teams into a playoff.

Byes are filled automatically when the entry count isn't a power of two, and an optional third-place match can be added. A bye isn't a game, so it isn't drawn on the bracket — the entrant who has one simply appears in the next round, with their spot in round one left blank.

Seeding

Seeding decides who plays whom in round one — typically strongest vs weakest. Skoryd ranks entrants by average PPR (gross throwing production), which is a better skill signal than raw win count, then places them into the bracket using a snake seed so the strongest and weakest are kept apart early.

Seed sources

When you generate the bracket you pick where the seeding numbers come from, using one dropdown of options grouped by source:

• This event's round robin — seed the playoff from the group-stage results (the default for RR + bracket).
• Skill rating (SSR) — seed by each player's Skoryd Skill Rating, an opponent-strength-based skill number rather than raw production. A player's singles and doubles ratings are blended into one number so anyone with a rating gets seeded.
• This club — overall results across the club.
• Quick Play — casual-play results.
• Previous leagues / tournaments — a recent completed event at this club (bounded to the last ~90 days so the list stays short).
• Global — results across all clubs (good for an open, cross-club tournament).
• Seasons — a season's standings, either a club season or a global season.

Entrants with no history in the chosen source seed at the bottom.

Rank by

The seed source says which games count. Rank by says what number those games produce — and the two are picked separately, so you can rank this club's results by production or by differential without changing the source.

For cornhole:

• PPR — production. Gross bags per round. The default, and the best choice when you are seeding people you do not know: it is the most transferable measure of individual skill, and it seeds a newcomer sensibly instead of dropping them to the bottom.
• DPR — differential. Your production minus your opponents'. Rewards players who suppress the other side rather than only scoring well themselves.
• OPR — overall. A 0–100 composite of production, defence and win rate.
• Skill rating (SSR). The opponent-strength-based rating described above.

For darts the list is three-dart average, checkout %, and skill rating (SSR).

Every measure works with every source, including a single previous event — all of them are built from the same per-match records.

Skill rating is a single number per player built from their whole history, so no seed source changes it — the stats source is hidden when you pick it.

Period — seeding on recent form

By default a seed uses a player's whole history in the chosen source. Period narrows that to the last 30, 60, 90 or 120 days, which is how many organizers seed: what someone has been throwing lately, rather than what they averaged two years ago.

It sits between Rank by and the stats source, because it changes which sources can answer. A single event already is a window, so choosing a period removes "this event's round robin" and the previous-events list — pick a club, season or global source instead.

Skill rating has no period. A rating is a single evolving number and only its current value is stored, so there is no past value to narrow to.

Why a seed number can differ from the leaderboard

A seed counts every game a player has played — singles and doubles together. A leaderboard tab shows one format. So the same player can read 9.63 PPR on the singles board and 9.31 as a seed, and both are right: the seed also includes their doubles rounds.

That is deliberate. If seeds were per-format, a player who has only ever played doubles would seed at the very bottom of a singles bracket despite being one of your strongest players.

Just-for-fun events

Marking an event Just for fun keeps its games out of leaderboards, seasons and ratings. It does not stop the event organising itself: a round robin + bracket event can still seed its own bracket from its own round robin, and you can still pick a just-for-fun event by name from the previous-events list.

What those games stay out of is the aggregate sources — This club, Global, Quick Play and any season. That is what the setting is for.

On a tandem doubles event the ranking uses tandem results. If nobody in the field has played tandem yet, it falls back to ordinary doubles numbers, which are the closest comparable results.

Bracket play format

The bracket doesn't have to be played in the same format as the round robin. On the generate page, Bracket play format lets you pick Singles or Doubles for the playoff whatever the group stage was:

• Singles round robin → doubles bracket — players qualify individually, then get paired into teams for the playoff (see Pairing method below).
• Doubles round robin → singles bracket — the teams break up and each player advances on their own, seeded by their individual results.
• Same format both phases — the normal case. A fixed-partner doubles event keeps its registered partners in the bracket.

Bracket matches show the teams or players that actually played them, so a doubles bracket lists both partners on the scorer, the results page, and the podium even though the event itself was set up as singles.

Pairing method (doubles brackets from individuals)

When a doubles bracket is built from individual players who don't have fixed partners — a singles event turned into a doubles bracket, or a Partner Switch event (partners rotated all tournament, so there are no permanent teams) — the generate page asks how to form the teams:

• Balanced (snake) — strongest with weakest (seed 1 + seed N, seed 2 + seed N−1, …), for even teams.
• Stacked — seed 1 + seed 2, seed 3 + seed 4, … (the top players team up).
• Split — the field is halved and each top-half player is paired with the matching bottom-half player (with 8: 1+5, 2+6, 3+7, 4+8).
• 50/50 draw — the field is halved as above, but the pairing across the halves is random. Every team still gets one top-half player and one bottom-half player, so the teams stay even, but nobody can predict who they'll be drawn with.
• Blind draw — random pairs from the whole field.

50/50 draw vs blind draw. A blind draw shuffles everyone together, so it can land two of your strongest players on the same team and two of your weakest on another. A 50/50 draw keeps the luck of the draw and rules that out. Pick blind draw when you want pure chance; pick 50/50 when you want a random draw that still produces a competitive bracket.

Both random methods show a 🔀 Reshuffle button — the draw on screen is the one that gets generated, so reshuffle until you're happy, then generate.

Balanced, stacked, split, and 50/50 rank the field by the seed source above, so load seed stats first. (A regular fixed-partner doubles event keeps the partners set on the event, so it doesn't show this.)

On a split-groups event — mixed doubles, pro-am, or any other two-group event — the bracket pairs across the groups whichever method you pick, so every team is still one player from each. The method only decides the order within each group, and both random methods become the same draw across the groups. See Event formats.

Bracket dates

The generate page asks which day (or days) the bracket is played on, so it shows real dates on the schedule instead of "Date TBD":

• Tournaments list the event's own dates with the ones left after the round robin already ticked. Tick or untick days as you like — bracket rounds are spread evenly across the days you pick. If the round robin ran all the way to the last day, the bracket defaults to that same day.
• Leagues don't have a fixed date list, so you pick one day for the bracket. It defaults to a week after the last round-robin match.

You can always adjust individual match dates afterwards on the schedule editor.

Regenerating the bracket

If a bracket comes out wrong — wrong format, wrong size, or seeded before the last round-robin scores were in — an organizer can use Delete bracket on the event page. That removes only the bracket; the round-robin matches and their scores are kept, so you can generate a new bracket straight away.

During the bracket

Winners advance automatically as matches are approved; in double elimination, a loss (including a forfeit) drops the team into the Losers bracket. The bracket page shows the live state, and a finished bracket match returns you to the bracket view rather than the event page.

Forfeits

A forfeit ends that player's or team's event — they can't get back in. Whoever was still standing wins the match and moves on as normal.

In the Grand Final of a double-elimination bracket, that decides the whole event:

• Losers-bracket finalist forfeits → the Winners-bracket finalist is champion.
• Winners-bracket finalist forfeits → the Losers-bracket finalist is champion, and the reset game is not played. There's no decider to play against someone who has withdrawn.

Either way the podium and the final standings show the same champion, and the event can be completed straight away.

The reset game that isn't played

The Grand Final's reset is an if necessary game: it only happens when the Losers-bracket finalist wins the first one. When the Winners-bracket finalist wins outright (or the Grand Final is forfeited), the event is decided and the reset is never played.

Its card stays on the bracket — that's how an "if necessary" game works on a printed bracket too, and removing it would make the diagram jump around as results come in. Once the Grand Final decides things the card reads Not needed, and opening it says so. The event can be marked complete with that game sitting there; it isn't waiting on anything.

Once a bracket exists, the event page's standings table is labelled Round-robin standings — it stays the qualifying record that decided the seeding, and doesn't change as bracket games are played. The bracket's own games are listed underneath in Bracket results, and the final placings appear on the podium when the event completes. The Match Scores page keeps the two phases in separate sections for the same reason: bracket round 1 isn't round-robin round 1.

Reading the bracket

The bracket is drawn like a printed paper bracket, with connector lines running from each match into the next. In double elimination the Winner's Bracket sits on top, the Loser's Bracket below, and the Grand Final on the right.

• Match numbers — each match has a small number in its left corner.
• Empty slots name where the player will come from rather than showing a blank — e.g. "Winner of #7" or, in the Losers bracket, "Loser of #7" so you can trace where a losing team drops in.
• Every match keeps a fixed spot, so the layout doesn't jump around as games finish. On a phone, the bracket scrolls sideways.