How to make a tournament bracket with an odd number of teams

How to make a tournament bracket with an odd number of teams

The quickest solution is to use OfficePoolStop's popular bracket maker. You can also select the bracket size using our fillable brackets page.  Best of all, generating and printing a bracket at our website is free. Unlike other sites, you could even run your own office pool where players can fill out a bracket before the tournament and compete with others.

Typically a tournament bracket with an odd number of teams is constructed by seeding teams, then giving teams with the highest seed a first round bye.  The goal is to get the tournament down to the nearest power of 2 (e.g. 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc). Any remainder after this is the number of bye teams needed. For example, to create an 11-team tournament, the 11-team tournament's nearest power of 2 value is 8, hence 3 teams would need a first round bye. So in the figure below, the 3 highest seeded teams do not play in the first round.
11-Team tournament bracket example




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