How to make a tournament draw with byes

Club championships rarely get a tidy sixteen entries. Eleven sign up, or thirteen, and somebody has to decide who plays in the first round and who goes straight through. The rules for that are the same at every level of the game, and they take ten minutes once you know them.

Work out the size of the draw#

A knockout draw halves at every round, so its size is a power of two. Use the smallest one that holds every entry.

One seed for every four places in the draw is the usual rule. With fewer entries than that suggests, seed fewer players: a seed nobody would recognise as one helps nobody.

How many byes there are#

The byes are the size of the draw minus the entries. Eleven entries in a draw of sixteen leaves five byes.

A bye is an empty line in the first round. The player beside it goes straight through to the second round. Byes only ever happen in the first round: after that, every line has a player on it.

Choose the seeds before you draw#

Seeds keep the strongest players apart until the later rounds, so the final is not decided in the first week. Choose them from last year’s results, the club ladder or the committee’s judgement, and write the order down before the draw is made.

Where the seeds go#

1. Seed 1 goes on the top line of the draw.
2. Seed 2 goes on the bottom line.
3. Seeds 3 and 4 are drawn by lot. One goes on the top line of the second quarter, the other on the bottom line of the third quarter. Toss a coin for which.
4. In a draw of 32 or more, the next four seeds are drawn by lot, one into each quarter. No two seeds can then meet before the quarter-finals.

Give out the byes#

Byes go to the seeds first, in seed order. Seed 1’s first opponent is a bye, then seed 2’s, then seed 3’s, and so on until the byes or the seeds run out.

If there are more byes than seeds, spread the rest as evenly as they will go: between the two halves first, then between the quarters. One half of the draw should not get an easy first round.

Draw the rest of the names#

Put every unseeded name in a hat and draw them onto the empty lines from the top down. Do it in front of somebody, or on a club night. A draw people watched being made is a draw nobody questions.

A worked example: eleven entries#

Eleven players enter. The draw is sixteen, so there are five byes, and there are four seeds.

• Seed 1 goes on line 1, with a bye on line 2.
• Seed 2 goes on line 16, with a bye on line 15.
• Seed 3 is drawn onto line 12, with a bye on line 11.
• Seed 4 is drawn onto line 5, with a bye on line 6.
• The fifth bye goes in the bottom half, on line 14, beside whoever is drawn onto line 13.
• The other seven names come out of the hat onto lines 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 13.

That leaves three first-round matches, and eight players in the quarter-finals.

Dates, withdrawals and a plate#

Give every round a date to be played by, and print them on the draw. A round with no date is the round that drags on for a month.

If somebody withdraws after the draw is made, their opponent goes through on a walkover. Do not make the draw again: everybody has already seen it.

The free tournament draw generator applies these rules for you. Type the entries with the seeds first, and it places the seeds and byes and draws the rest by lot. For choosing the seeds in the first place, see how to seed and draw your club championships.

Four rules and a hat, and nobody can say the draw was fixed.

Many clubs run a plate for everybody who loses their first match, so nobody’s championship is one match long. Count a player’s first match played, not their first line: a seed who had a bye and then lost belongs in the plate too.