Knock-out

The knock-out (or cup) system pairs the field in a bracket: the loser of each match is out, the winner moves on to the next round, and the last one standing wins the tournament. It is available for both individual and team events (as Team Knock-out), and comes in four variations:

The knock-out is chosen as the pairing system on the tournament form (see Managing Tournaments), and the variation as the pairing variation.

How the bracket is drawn

• Seeding — players are seeded by their starting rank (rating, then title…); teams by their pairing number. The two strongest seeds are placed in opposite halves of the bracket, so they can only meet in the final.
• Byes — when the number of participants is not a power of two (8, 16, 32…), the bracket is padded up to the next one and the top seeds skip round one. There is no other kind of bye: the arbiter cannot assign zero- or half-point byes in a knock-out.
• Number of rounds — set automatically from the size of the field (four rounds for 9 to 16 players, five for 17 to 32, and so on; twice as many with two-game matches). The Rounds field of the tournament form is filled in for you and cannot be edited.
• Rounds are paired one at a time with the Pair button, once every match of the previous round has been decided.

Once round one is paired, the bracket is fixed: no player (or team) can be added, and the pairing settings below can no longer be changed.

Deciding a match

A decisive game sends its winner through. When a game is drawn (or a two-game match ends level on aggregate, or a team match ends level on game points), the match is decided by the advancement tie-breaks.

In a knock-out, the tie-breaks configured for the tournament are not used to rank the standings (a knock-out is ranked by the round reached, see below): they decide who advances from a level match, in the order you list them. Only tie-breaks that can separate two participants who reached the same stage are offered — for instance the rating, the pairing number, the number of games won (or won with Black), the tournament performance rating, and, for teams, the board count, top board results or bottom board elimination.

The special Manual tie-break lets you decide the match yourself, typically after a play-off (Armageddon, blitz games…) played over the board: the pairing row of a level match then shows a Mark as winner button next to each side.

If the tie-breaks you configured cannot decide a level match, Sharly Chess refuses to pair the next round and tells you so. Add the Manual tie-break — or other advancement tie-breaks — to the tournament’s tie-break settings. Anything listed after Manual can never apply, since a play-off settles the match outright.

The pairing row of a level match shows the value of each advancement tie-break for both sides, and which one decided the match.

Variations

Single elimination

The classic cup: one game per match, one loss and you are out.

Single elimination — two-game matches

Each match is played over two games, with the colours reversed: the stronger seed has White in the first game and Black in the second. The match is decided on the aggregate of the two games; a level aggregate is decided by the advancement tie-breaks, as above. The tournament has twice as many rounds.

Double elimination

Two brackets run side by side:

• The upper bracket is a single elimination. A participant who loses there is not out: they drop into the lower bracket.
• The lower bracket gathers the upper-bracket losers. A loss there is the second loss, which eliminates.
• The Grand Final opposes the champion of each bracket.

With the Grand final reset option, the upper-bracket champion — who has not lost yet — must be beaten twice: if the lower-bracket champion wins the Grand Final, a deciding second game is played. The extra round is reserved in the schedule (so that it can be given a date and time) but is skipped, and the tournament ends early, when no reset is needed.

Double elimination — two-game matches

Double elimination with every match played over two games with colours reversed.

Settings

The pairing settings depend on the variation:

Colour assignment

• Alternate colours (default) — each participant takes the opposite colour to its previous round; when two participants who need the same colour meet, the higher seed alternates and the lower seed takes what is left.
• Higher seed plays White — the stronger seed has White in every match.
• Drawing of lots — colours are drawn at random for each match.

In a team match, the colour is that of the first board (the other boards alternate as usual).

Group by

Seeding by group — by club or federation for individuals, by affiliation or federation for teams (plugins may add other criteria) — lays the bracket out so that each group is its own sub-bracket: members of a group play each other first, groups meet later, and the two strongest groups can only meet in the final. Within a group, players are ordered by rating and teams by pairing number; participants without a value join a single “unaffiliated” group.

Every group is padded with byes to the same power-of-two size, so uneven groups cost byes and rounds. The tournament form shows a live preview of the groups, the size of the resulting bracket, its number of rounds and its byes for the selected criterion, and warns you when the groups are so uneven that most of the bracket would be byes. For best results, make the groups equal in size — ideally 2, 4, 8 or 16 participants each.

During the tournament

• The left column of the pairings screen lists who is still in, by bracket (upper and lower for a double elimination), and folds the eliminated away.
• The round navigation names each stage: Round of 16, Quarterfinals, Semifinals, Final, and the upper / lower bracket stages and Grand Final of a double elimination. The third-place playoff is played in the same round as the final.
• Results are entered as usual (see Managing Pairings), but a round becomes read-only once the next round has been paired from its results. To correct a result, unpair the following round first.
• The ranking is by the round reached, shown in plain language rather than as points: Winner, Runner-up, Third place and Fourth place (with a third-place playoff), Out — round N, or Still in while the bracket is running.

Documents

The Knock-out Bracket document, available for knock-out tournaments in the Documents dialog, prints the bracket diagram with the results so far. Its schedule option prints the same matches as a chronological list, round by round, with the date and time of each round when they have been set.

Team knock-out

A team knock-out works the same way, with teams in place of players: each match is a team match, played on the boards of the two teams with the lineups of the round (see Running team rounds), and the team scoring the more game points advances. A level match is decided by the team advancement tie-breaks, or by the arbiter with the Manual tie-break.