How to Seed a Club Tournament (and Where the Byes Go)
How to seed a knockout draw for your club championships: how many seeds to use, where to place them, how byes work when you don't have 8, 16 or 32 entries, and how to seed doubles pairs.
A knockout draw looks simple until you have to make one. You have 13 entries, two of them are clearly the best players in the club, and three people want to know why they are playing each other in the first round again.
Seeding is how you keep a knockout fair. Done properly, the strongest players meet as late as possible, the byes go where they should, and nobody can reasonably complain about the draw. This guide covers how to do it.
Why seed at all?
Without seeding, a random draw can put your two best players against each other in round one. One of them goes out immediately, the final is a mismatch, and the club championship loses its best match of the year.
Seeding fixes that by placing the strongest players apart in the draw. It does not decide who wins. It just makes sure the best players have to beat everyone else before they meet.
How many seeds?
A common rule of thumb is one seed for every four entries:
| Draw size | Seeds |
|---|---|
| 8 | 2 |
| 16 | 4 |
| 32 | 8 |
| 64 | 16 |
Some clubs seed the whole field, so every player's place in the draw reflects their standing. That works well when you have a good rating for everyone, and it gives the fairest first round.
Where the seeds go
The aim is simple: seed 1 and seed 2 can only meet in the final, seeds 1 to 4 can only meet in the semi-finals, and so on.
In an 8-player draw that means:
- Seed 1 at the top of the draw, playing the lowest-ranked player
- Seed 2 at the bottom of the draw
- Seeds 3 and 4 in the other two quarters
Seed 1 plays seed 8 in the first round, seed 4 plays seed 5, seed 3 plays seed 6, and seed 2 plays seed 7. If everyone wins the matches they should, the semi-finals are 1 v 4 and 2 v 3, and the final is 1 v 2.
The classic mistake is to put the seeds in order down the draw (1, 2, 3, 4 at the top). That puts seeds 1 and 2 in the same half, so they meet in the semi-final instead of the final.
Byes: when you don't have 8, 16 or 32
A knockout needs a draw size that keeps halving: 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128. If you have 13 entries, the draw is 16, and three places are empty. Those empty places are byes: the player drawn against an empty place goes straight into round two.
The byes go to the top seeds. With 13 entries in a 16 draw, seeds 1, 2 and 3 get byes. This is fair, because those players would have been expected to win their first-round match anyway, and it is what players expect.
Byes should also be spread through the draw rather than bunched together, so each half has a similar number of first-round matches. Seeding in the standard positions does this automatically.
Seeding doubles pairs
For doubles, seed the pair, not the players. The simplest fair way is to take the average of the two players' ratings. A pair of two good players should be seeded above a pair of one excellent player and one beginner.
Pairs with no rating at all are best placed at the bottom of the seeding until they have results.
What to seed from
Use the most objective measure you have:
- Ratings: World Tennis Number, UTR, SquashLevels, DUPR or Playtomic levels, depending on the sport
- Your club's own levels or bands
- Results: last year's championship, the club ladder, box league positions
Whatever you use, say so in the competition's rules. Players accept a draw much more readily when they know how it was made.
When to adjust by hand
Seeding by rating gets you most of the way. Sometimes you will want to move someone: a strong player returning from injury with an out-of-date rating, or a new member nobody has seen play. Move them by hand, and keep the rest of the seeding as it is.
How Rallio seeds a draw
Rallio's competitions do all of the above. Players enter themselves from a link (in doubles they choose a partner, or send them a link to fill the spot). Rallio seeds the field from players' ratings: the average of the two players for a doubles pair, with unrated entries last. A squash competition can seed by SquashLevels level.
You can pin any entry where you want it, and the rest of the seeding keeps its order. Before you publish, the seeding table shows the first-round matches the draw will produce, so you can check it. Rallio places seed 1 against the lowest seed and seeds 1 and 2 in opposite halves, and gives any byes to the top seeds. Draws run from 2 to 128 entries.
Once it's published, players arrange and score their own matches and the winners go through. Until the first result is in you can take the draw back and redo it; after that you can still re-pair any round that hasn't been played. For finals day, a live board link puts the draw on the clubhouse TV.
Running a tennis championship? See tennis tournament software. For padel, see padel tournaments. Or set up a free group at rallio.io. Rallio runs on web, iOS and Android, and it is free while we are in beta.
