Single or double elimination? How esports brackets crown a champion
One loss and you are out, or one loss and you drop a floor. The bracket format shapes how many series a team plays, how much a bad day costs and why grand finals sometimes look lopsided.
Illustration: Maxivaleur design team.
Our tournament pages draw both kinds of brackets, and many events mix them: a double-elimination upper and lower bracket in the group stage, then single elimination in the playoffs.
Single elimination
Teams are paired, the winner advances, the loser leaves. Eight teams need three rounds — quarter-finals, semi-finals, final — and seven series in total. It is short, easy to follow and unforgiving: the second-best team in the event can go out in the first round if the seeding puts it against the best.
Double elimination
Every team starts in the upper bracket. A loss there sends the team into the lower bracket instead of ending its event; a loss in the lower bracket ends it. The upper-bracket winner and the lower-bracket winner meet in the grand final.
That gives every team at least two series and makes an early stumble recoverable, at the cost of more matches and a longer schedule.
The grand final question
Because the lower-bracket finalist has already lost once, some organisers give the upper-bracket finalist a one-map head start or require the lower-bracket side to win two series in a row (a "bracket reset"). Our bracket view notes which rule applies above the final.
How to read our bracket view
Each box shows both teams, the series score and the series length (best of three or five). Open a box to see the map or game results in order. The winning side is set in bold; nothing else in the box is styled to suggest who "should" have won.
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