Double elimination

Double elimination is a bracket where you are out after two losses, not one. Losing in the main bracket does not end your run. It moves you to a second bracket.

When to use it

• You want a fairer result than single elimination, where one bad match is not final.
• You have between 3 and 256 participants and time for roughly twice as many matches.
• Your tournament is competitive enough that the extra matches are worth it. For a quick event, use Single elimination.

How it works here

The bracket has three parts.

1. Winners bracket. Everyone starts here. Win and you stay. Lose and you drop to the losers bracket.
2. Losers bracket. Players who lost once play each other. Lose here and you are out.
3. Grand final. The winners bracket champion plays the losers bracket champion.

360clash generates the whole bracket when the stage starts. Winners and losers move into their next match on their own as results come in.

Grand final reset. The winners bracket champion has not lost yet, so the losers bracket champion has to beat them twice. When the organizer turns on "Grand final reset", a second final is played only if the losers bracket champion wins the first one. If the winners bracket champion wins the first final, the reset is skipped. The reset is off by default.

Split participants. With "Split participants (bottom half starts in the losers bracket)", only the top seeds start in the winners bracket: half the bracket size, so 8 in a field of 9 to 16. Everyone else starts in the losers bracket, in an opening round whose winners meet the first players to drop from the winners bracket. Starting in the losers bracket means your first loss ends your run.

Seeding. In the first stage of a tournament, the organizer places each entry in a bracket slot, or gives everyone a random one. A later double elimination stage is seeded by the stage feeding it.

Draws. A bracket cannot move on from a draw. See Match formats.

Corrections. If staff change who won a completed match, every later match the old result moved someone into is cleared and played again, on both the winner's and the loser's path. The organizer sees a preview of what will be cleared before saving. Correcting only the score, with the same winner, clears nothing.

How places are decided

• First place: the winner of the grand final (or of the reset, if it is played).
• Second place: the other grand finalist.
• Everyone else: ranked by when they were knocked out of the losers bracket. The later you go out, the higher your place. Participants knocked out in the same round share a place.

While the bracket is running, the winners bracket champion is shown ahead of everyone still in the losers bracket, because they cannot finish lower than second.

Settings organizers choose

On the stage form, choose Double Elimination, then:

• Match format: Best of 1, 3, 5 or 7, or a fixed number of games. See Match formats. It can be set per round.
• Results entered as: score for every game, or winner with optional score.
• Split participants: see above.
• Grand final reset: see above.
• Match tiebreak: only needed for matches set to a fixed number of games.
• Optional map pool and map veto.