Tournaments
A multi-team bracket where every match is its own real trivia game.
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Play a free daily game Start hosting freeWhat a tournament is
A tournament is a multi-team competition run as a series of head-to-head matches. It is not a single round inside one game. Each match is its own full trivia or lightning game between two teams, and the result of that game decides who advances.
Pick a format, register the teams, and the platform builds the schedule or bracket for you. From there you start matches one at a time, the winners move on, and the tournament ends with a champion.
How a tournament runs
First you pick a format and a team count. You can change the team count on the Settings tab until the bracket is generated.
Then you register the teams. You can type the names in when you create the tournament, or add them later on the Teams tab. Teams can also sign themselves up on the tournament page, which anyone can open with the join code (the link is /t/ plus the code), and a signed-in player can enter one of their saved teams there. Sign-ups close once every slot is full or the bracket starts.
Next the bracket or schedule is generated. If you typed in a full roster when you created the tournament, this happens for you, with seeds in the order you listed the teams. Otherwise you set the seeds on the Teams tab (by hand or at random) and press Generate Bracket (Generate Schedule for round robin). That seeding decides the first-round matchups. You do not have to wait for every slot: single elimination starts with any field of 4 or more and gives byes to the top seeds, round robin starts with 3 or more, and double elimination needs exactly 4, 8, 16 or 32. The tournament is resized to the teams that started, and teams cannot be added or removed after this.
Then you play the matches. Starting a match creates a brand-new game for exactly the two teams in that match, with its own join code, in the tournament's game mode. You host it like any other game. When the game ends, the higher score wins the match and the bracket moves on by itself. The winner advances, and in elimination formats the loser drops to the losers bracket or is knocked out.
When the deciding match is played, the champion is locked in and the tournament is marked complete.
Variants
Round Robin
Every team plays every other team once. The best win-loss record wins.
There is no bracket and nobody is knocked out. The schedule pairs each team against every other team exactly once, so a tournament of N teams runs a fixed set of matches. With an even number of teams everyone plays the same number of games each round; with an odd number, one team sits out on a bye each round.
Standings are sorted by wins first. When exactly two teams have the same number of wins, the team that won their match against each other goes ahead. Any other tie (three or more teams level, or two teams whose match is not played yet) is broken by point differential (points scored minus points allowed), then by total points scored, then by seed. When every match is done, the team at the top of the standings is the champion.
Round robin allows 3 to 32 teams. It plays the most matches of any format, but no one has a bad night cut short by a single loss.
Single Elimination
Lose once and you are out. The last team standing wins.
Teams are placed into a seeded bracket. The winner of each match advances to the next round and the loser is eliminated. This repeats until one team is left, and that team is the champion.
It runs any field from 4 to 32 teams. A field that is not a power of two is padded up to the next one and the spare slots become byes, handed to the top seeds, so five, six or seven teams still get a real bracket. A team with a bye sits out the first round and starts in round two. A bye is not a win or a loss, so it does not change a team's record.
It is the fastest format and finishes in the fewest matches (an N-team field plays N-1 of them), but a single upset ends a strong team's run.
Double Elimination
It takes two losses to be eliminated. A losers bracket gives a second life.
There are two brackets. Teams start in the winners bracket. The first time a team loses it drops into the losers bracket instead of going home, where it can keep playing. A second loss eliminates the team for good.
The winners bracket survivor meets the losers bracket survivor in the grand final. Because the losers bracket team already carries one loss, the grand final can run a reset match: if the losers bracket team wins the first grand final, both teams then have one loss and a deciding match is played to settle the champion.
A team that drops into the losers bracket is sent to the other side of the bracket from the teams it already beat, so its first losers bracket match is never a rematch. The one exception is the loser of the winners bracket final, which drops into the single losers final.
It needs an exact power-of-two field: 4, 8, 16, or 32 teams. Byes are not supported here, because the losers bracket is laid out in advance and a first-round bye would leave slots nothing could ever fill. For an in-between field, run single elimination or round robin. It is the fairest of the elimination formats since one bad match does not end your tournament, but it runs roughly twice as many matches.
Host setup options
| Option | What it controls |
|---|---|
| Format Default: single_elimination |
The competition structure for the whole tournament.
Single elimination: one loss is out. Double elimination: two losses are out, with a losers bracket. Round robin: everyone plays everyone and the best record wins. Single elimination takes 4 to 32 teams and fills any gap with byes; double elimination needs exactly 4, 8, 16, or 32 teams; round robin allows 3 to 32.
|
| Match game mode Default: standard |
What kind of trivia game every match runs.
Standard runs classic trivia rounds. Lightning runs every round of every match as a Lightning round: everyone answers at once on their phone, and faster correct answers score more. Every match in the bracket uses this mode, even a match started from a saved template, and it locks once the bracket is generated.
|
| Public tournament Default: Off |
Mark the tournament public and post its results to the community forum.
On: the tournament is listed as public, and when it finishes a results recap naming the champion is posted to the community forum under your name. Off: no forum post. Either way, anyone with the join code can open the tournament page to watch the bracket and sign a team up while registration is open.
|
| Rounds per match Default: 3 (range 1 to 10) |
How many trivia rounds decide each head-to-head match.
More rounds make a match longer and reduce the chance of an upset. It locks once the bracket is generated. A match you start from a saved template uses the template's rounds instead.
|
| Questions per round Default: 10 (range 5 to 20) |
How many questions each round of a match contains.
Sets the pace of every match across the whole tournament. It locks once the bracket is generated. A match you start from a saved template uses the template's question counts instead.
|
🏆 Glory Points
Each tournament match is a full game, so it pays Glory Points (GP) the same way any game does when it finishes. Winning matches and going deep in the bracket builds GP across the season.
Finishing the whole tournament also awards a finals bonus on top of the per-match Glory. See the Glory Points guide for the full breakdown.
Tips for hosts
Match your format to your night. Single elimination is fastest and most dramatic, double elimination is the fairest because one loss does not end a team's run, and round robin guarantees everyone the same number of games.
You host every match, and the bracket does the bookkeeping: when you end a match's game, its result is reported and the winner advances on its own, so you can run matches back to back from the bracket page. You can also report a result by hand with Report Result, for example when a match was played on paper.
Pick Lightning for a quicker, higher-energy event. Every round becomes a Lightning round where the fastest correct answers score the most. Keep rounds per match low to finish a big bracket in one night.
If you want a fixed set of teams, type them in when you create the tournament. If you want sign-ups, leave the roster empty and share the join code, then generate the bracket when the room is ready, even if some slots are still open.
Fairness & the fine print
Seeding is random by default, so first-round matchups are not stacked in anyone's favor unless the host deliberately arranges the seeds.
Advancement is decided by the score of each match's own game. The team that wins the game wins the match, and the winner can never be the team with the lower score. A match cannot end in a tie. If a game finishes level, the bracket waits and marks the match as tied: break the tie however you like, then press Report Result. The form opens on the real, level scores with Won on a tiebreak ticked, so you only pick the winner.
A result is counted once. To fix a typo, press Fix result on the match: the old result is undone (wins, losses, points, and who moved on) and the corrected one is applied. If the fix keeps the same winner, only the points change, and you can do it at any time. To change the winner after the next match for those teams has started or finished, fix the later match first and work backwards. Every correction is saved with who made it, when, and why, and the list shows on the Settings tab.
In the elimination formats the champion is always first and the runner-up (the team that lost the deciding final) is always second. Everyone else is placed by how late they were knocked out: the later a team went out, the higher it finishes. In double elimination that is the losers bracket round where it took its second loss, so the team that lost the losers bracket final is third even if a team knocked out earlier won more matches on the way. Teams knocked out in the same round share that stage and are listed by most wins, then point differential, then seed.
Each match is a separate game with its own join code, so players join the match they are scheduled for, not the tournament as a whole.
The match game mode and the rounds and questions per match are locked once the bracket is generated, and so is the team count. You can change the game mode and public setting on the Settings tab until then. The format cannot be changed after you create the tournament.
The bracket shows on the TV and on the tournament page, and it updates on its own every few seconds as matches finish. When the tournament ends, the display shows the champion.
When a tournament finishes, the host and every signed-in player who registered a team get a results email, unless they turned tournament emails off in their settings. If you later fix a result and the champion changes, the forum recap is updated and each of them gets one correction email.
Tournaments need a plan that includes them. Pro runs up to 2 a month; Business and Enterprise run as many as you like.
A private tournament that never got a single team is deleted after 60 days without changes. A tournament with teams is never deleted for you.
A finished tournament stays on record: you can delete one while it is still being set up or played, but not after its champion is crowned. Practice tournaments can always be deleted, and their matches are practice games that do not count toward the leaderboard or Glory Points.
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