Single elimination

Single elimination is a knockout bracket: you play one opponent per round, the winner moves on, and the loser is out. It is the fastest way to find a champion.

When to use it

• You want a clear winner in as few matches as possible.
• You have between 3 and 256 participants.
• Players can accept that one bad match ends their run. If you want to give players a second chance, use Double elimination.

The number of rounds grows slowly with the field. 8 participants need 3 rounds, 16 need 4, and 64 need 6.

How it works here

1. When the stage starts, 360clash generates the whole bracket up front.
2. Each round, winners move into the next match. When a match is finished, the winner appears in their next match on its own.
3. The last match is the final. Its winner is first, its loser is second.

Byes and the play-in round. If the field is not a power of two (8, 16, 32 and so on), the bracket starts with a round called "Play-in". In a seeded bracket, the lowest seeds play it and the higher seeds skip it and start in Round 1. In a bracket placed by hand, the slot each entry is placed in decides whether it plays the play-in. When a match ends up with only one real side, for example after a no-show or disqualification upstream, that side wins automatically and moves on.

Seeding. In the first stage of a tournament, the bracket is placed by hand. The organizer puts each entry in a bracket slot, or gives everyone a random slot. Nobody has a seed number in that case. A later single elimination stage is seeded by the results of the stage that feeds it, and cannot be reseeded by hand.

Draws. A bracket cannot move on from a draw. Players cannot report a drawn best-of match. A match set to a fixed number of games must have a match tiebreak, and a level result is refused unless it says who won through that tiebreak. See Match formats for how a level series is settled.

Third place match. When enabled, the two losers of the semifinals play each other. It is shown beside the final and has its own match format setting. It needs two semifinals. Organizers can add it while the stage is running. They can remove it until it has a result, a report, a recorded game or proof attached.

How places are decided

• First place: the winner of the final.
• Second place: the loser of the final.
• Third and fourth place: the winner and loser of the third place match, if there is one.
• Everyone else: ranked by the round they were knocked out in. Participants knocked out in the same round share the same place.

Without a third place match, both semifinal losers share third place.

Settings organizers choose

On the stage form, under "Structure", choose Single Elimination. Then:

• Match format: Best of 1, 3, 5 or 7, or a fixed number of games. See Match formats.
• Results entered as: whether players must enter a score for every game, or only pick the winner.
• Third place match: on or off.
• Match tiebreak: only needed for matches set to a fixed number of games.
• Optional map pool and map veto, per stage.

Match formats can also be set per round on the stage's "Round settings" tab, so you can play early rounds as best of 1 and the final as best of 5.