A knockout round is your classic competition. The winner of a match progresses, the loser is eliminated.
When using a knockout round, it will always seek to round up however many entries are in the round to a full bracket, adding byes, to ensure the number of matches is 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 etc.
A knockout round draws two entries together, home and away.
In this model, each round is drawn separately. This is a common setup adopted by pool leagues, who want to draw a round, allow a number of weeks for it to be played, and then all the winners get drawn in the next round.
Draw
This is where you can perform your draw.
You can use the Manually Draw Matches button if you want to make your draw a showpiece event, drawing names out of a hat on stream or in-venue. Or you may have just simply done it because your league dictates a witnessed draw.
The manual draw will allow you to complete the draw before all matches are selected. if you do this, it will randomize the remaining entries into the matches. This allows you to, if you choose to, set Bye vs Bye for as many matches as you can, and then randomly draw the rest.
But the easiest and hassle free way to do this is by Automatically Draw Matches. This will fully automatically draw your matches. It will draw players against Bye’s first the ensure there can be no Bye vs Bye matches.
Note: The automatic draw uses a shuffle mechanism. It shuffles the entries 3 times before drawing the home team and 3 times again before drawing the away team. It also records in the background the number of times the button has been rpessed to ensure transparency. Code sample available on request.
Preliminaries
If it is your first round in a knockout competition, you may end up with more Bye matches than real matches. In this case you can press Make Preliminary and it will auto-progress the atches with Byes and only insist the real matches are played, labelling the round as Preliminary also.
On the website it will also display all remaining entries so it ic perfectly clear that although their name isn’t in a match, they are still in the competition.
Start Round
Whever way you choose to do your draw, when you are happy with it you can press Start Round. Until you start the round, matches don’t appear on thre website, nor in players apps.
You can find out how scores are entered and how the competition progresses in the Round Execution page.