Note for LITE users
Playoffs are a PRO feature. You can create playoff brackets using the PRO version (or the Tournament Scheduler).
If you are currently using LITE, click the green PRO Features button on the Schedule Maker page, and then 'Try It Free' to add Playoffs to your existing schedule.
Note for Tournaments
For TOURNAMENTS – make sure to set up your playoffs before you generate the schedule (in tournaments all games are created and allocated in one go).
See below if you missed this and need to add a bracket.For LEAGUES – you can wait until the end of your regular season to set up playoffs (they are generated separately).
Video Tutorial
How to set up playoff brackets
Define Bracket
1. Expand the Divisions section
2. Click 'Add a Bracket'
3. Enter the parameters for your bracket
For most standard brackets, you will only need to put the number of teams and click Save Bracket.
For more on the different bracket settings, see Playoff Modes.
Define Seeding
You can define seeds with placeholders for rankings after the regular season (group stage) or select actual teams (i.e. if your tournament has no group stage).
Placeholders will automatically be replaced with actual teams according to the standings once you've filled in all group stage scores for the corresponding division (for more on this, see this article).
Autofill Seeds
In most cases, you can use the Autofill Seeds button to populate seeds with the most logical rank placeholders, i.e. 1, 2, 3, 4...
Note that Seed 1 plays vs Seed 8, Seed 2 vs Seed 7, and so on.
Combining pools
You can combine pools in the same division in a bracket. For instance, two pools of 4 can be combined into an 8-team bracket like this (autofill seeds button does this too):
One playoff game only
If you just want to just play one playoff round (without advancing winners to another round) you'll want to add a 2-team bracket for each of those games. This will only create one game with the placeholders according to how you set up the seeds:
Define Time Slots
For leagues, in particular, you'll want to make sure you have the right time slots set up for your playoffs.
Go to the Time Slots section and edit an existing or add a new time slot.
Once you've added at least one bracket, you'll see a link above the Weeks field on the time slot form to add extra playoff week.
This adds a week to your season to hold your playoffs. You can add more than one. These new weeks will also apply to any existing time slots that apply to all weeks (i.e. that don't have a subset of weeks selected).
You can also specify if a particular time slot should be used only for playoffs or both playoffs and round-robin (unrestricted) or just round-robin games.
This is useful if your playoffs start in your final week of the regular season* or, in tournaments, if your playoffs should be constrained to a certain day or time frame.
*If your playoffs do overlap with your regular season, please contact us – we currently need to apply a small workaround to make this work.
Generate Playoff Schedule
For leagues, you'll see a generate playoff schedule button at the bottom of the schedule maker:
Note: for tournaments, you will not see that button. Instead, you need to define your brackets before you generate any games. If you've already generated a schedule, click erase games and regenerate the whole schedule in order to generate the playoff schedule (OR see generating just one bracket below).
(Re-)generating just one bracket
If you need to (re-)generate just one bracket, you can do so by clicking the green 'refresh' button next to the bracket definition under Divisions.
This will leave all other games untouched and only use remaining unused time slots.
This can also be used with tournaments to generate playoffs if you forgot to set them up before generating your schedule.
Updating Seeds with Actual Teams
See this article for how to update your brackets with teams from standings after your group/pool stage.