New custom bracket structure available

Toornament is launching the new “Custom Bracket” structure today to give organizers even more freedom in creating their desired tournament format.

The custom bracket structure is available in beta and works for all your duel (1 vs 1 or team vs team) tournaments. It allows you to manually create brackets with custom participant progression, which would not be feasible with the many other formats available on Toornament.

For example, you can create brackets like the LFL or LPL playoffs, a triple-elimination bracket, a twin-headed gauntlet etc.

A custom bracket structure is defined by a “schema” that you have to write, to create all of the matches and relations between them.

Each match will be given a name, and then its two opponents will be identified, with three possibilities:

The opponent is placed in this match, and they are identified by the seed number
The opponent won a previous match, and they are identified by a “W” and the identifier of the match they won (i.e “W:A”)
The opponent lost a previous match, and they are identified by a “L” and the identifier of the match they lost (i.e “L:B”)

Example:

A=match identifier
[1,4]=participant seeds

full match syntax: A=[1,4]
The following syntax will generate a very simple Single-Elimination Bracket with 4 participants, with matches between seeds #1 and#4, and seeds #2 and #3, then a final between them and a 3rd place decider.

A=[1,4]
B=[2,3]
C=[W:A,W:B]
D=[L:A,L:B]
Note that each match must be placed on a separate line.

The full stage configuration page with its custom bracket schema

And here is the result of this series of 4 matches:

Below we have written another custom bracket schema not achievable with other Toornament structures.

In this example, we have reproduced the structure of the French League of Legends tournament playoffs. It involves 6 of the 10 teams from the championship regular season, in a Double-Elimination Bracket in which seeds #1 and #2 from the regular season start in the Winner Bracket, whereas seeds #3 to #6 start in the Loser Bracket.

Here is what the schema for such a bracket could look like:

B=[3,6]
C=[4,5]
D=[W:B,W:C]
A=[1,2]
E=[W:D,L:A]
F=[W:A,W:E]
As you can see, you can name and organize the matches as you prefer, to make the schema easier to ready and/or understand.

And here is the visual rendition of the 2023 LFL Summer Split Playoffs, with its results:

You can now test and play with this new format. Note that the “custom bracket” structure is still in “beta”, as we are still working no some of the edgier cases possible, and plan on improving the visual rendition of more complex bracket structures.