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How Tournament Brackets Work: Swiss Rounds, Top Cut and Tiebreakers
How Pokémon GO tournament brackets work: Swiss pairings, how many rounds, match points, OWP tiebreakers, top cut seeding and how to read a results page.
A tournament results page can look intimidating at first: a long table of names, records like 5-2-0, tiebreaker percentages with several decimal places and a bracket with only a handful of players. This guide explains the structure most Pokémon GO tournaments use, from a club night to a championship, and how to read the standings at the end; battle mechanics and team building live on the main Trainer Hub site.
The two halves of most events
Almost every sizeable tournament is split into two phases. First comes a Swiss phase, where everyone plays a fixed number of rounds however they are doing. Then the best records advance to a top cut, an elimination bracket that decides the winner. Small events sometimes skip the cut, and very small ones may run a round robin instead. The event listing should say which; our guide to reading a tournament listing shows where to look.
How Swiss pairing works
Round one is usually paired at random. After that, players meet opponents on the same record, or as close to it as possible: 1-0 plays 1-0, and 0-1 plays 0-1. Pairings avoid rematches, so you normally won't meet the same opponent twice in the Swiss. Say five players are on 2-0 after round two: four of them play each other and the fifth is "paired down" to face someone on 1-1. If the whole field is an odd number, one player, usually near the bottom of the standings and without a bye so far, gets a bye, which is normally scored as a win.
A single loss doesn't knock you out: a first-round loss simply puts you among the other players on one loss, and a strong run afterwards keeps you in contention. That makes Swiss far friendlier for newer players than straight elimination.
How many rounds?
The number of Swiss rounds grows with attendance. A useful rule of thumb is the smallest number of rounds that leaves at most one unbeaten player. Each extra round doubles the field it can handle:
| Players | Minimum rounds for a single unbeaten player |
|---|---|
| 3 to 4 | 2 |
| 5 to 8 | 3 |
| 9 to 16 | 4 |
| 17 to 32 | 5 |
| 33 to 64 | 6 |
| 65 to 128 | 7 |
| 129 to 256 | 8 |
Many organisers add a round or two so the players who make the cut have been separated by more games. Official events publish their own round structure, and very large ones may spread the Swiss over two days, with only players above a set record continuing to the second.
Match points and records
A record is written wins-losses-ties, so 5-2-0 means five sets won, two lost and none tied. Standings are sorted by match points. A common scheme gives 3 points for a win, 1 for a tie and 0 for a loss. In Pokémon GO each round is usually a best-of-three set, so what counts is who won the set, not how many individual games each player took.
Tiebreakers: why two 5-2 players are not equal
Many players finish on the same record, so standings need a tiebreaker. Official championship events have typically used two measures, in this order:
- Opponents' win percentage (OWP). Take each opponent you played, work out the share of their matches they won, and average those figures. In a four-round event where your opponents finished 3-1, 3-1, 2-2 and 1-3, their win rates are 75%, 75%, 50% and 25%, so your OWP is 56.25%. A high OWP means you faced a tough schedule.
- Opponents' opponents' win percentage (OOWP). The same calculation one step further out: how strong were the people your opponents played?
Byes are typically left out of these calculations, because there was no opponent to measure. And tournament software has typically applied a minimum value to each opponent's percentage, so facing someone who lost every round and dropped doesn't drag your tiebreakers down too far. Local events may use simpler tiebreakers, such as head-to-head result or games won.
Your tiebreakers keep moving after your own last set, because they depend on how your earlier opponents finish. That is why "am I in the cut?" often can't be answered until the final round is in.
The top cut
After the Swiss, the leading finishers (often the top 8, 16 or 32, depending on attendance) move into the elimination bracket. Seeding follows the final Swiss standings: first place plays the lowest seed in the cut, second plays the second-lowest, and so on, which is why tiebreakers matter even for players who are safely through. Cuts are usually single elimination, where one lost set ends your run, or double elimination, where a first loss drops you into a lower bracket and a second loss knocks you out, though organisers can choose other formats. Check the event's rules before you plan your day.
Reading a results page
| Column | What it means | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Rank or place | Final position after tiebreakers | Decides the cut and its seeding |
| Record | Swiss wins, losses and ties | Sorts the standings first |
| OWP | Average win rate of your opponents | First tiebreaker between equal records |
| OOWP | Average win rate of your opponents' opponents | Second tiebreaker |
| Dropped | The round a player left in, if they did | Explains gaps in pairings and unusual tiebreakers |
At official events, finishing positions can also earn points towards qualifying for the World Championships, which is covered in our guide to Championship Points and qualifying.
Dropping out and running your own event
Should I drop once I can't make the cut?
Only if you need to leave. Playing on is good practice: Swiss keeps pairing you with players on the same record, so your remaining rounds tend to be closely matched. If you do drop, tell the organiser, so nobody sits waiting for you.
I want to run my own event. Where do I start?
Our organiser's guide to running a small tournament walks through format, timings and scoring.