Gravity Forms
+ Tournament Bracket

Collecting team or player sign-ups with Gravity Forms is the easy part of running a cup, a club championship or a school knockout. The work starts after the deadline: someone has to seed the entrants, work out the byes when the number is not 8, 16 or 32, draw the bracket, keep it up to date after every match and tell each team who they play next. A spreadsheet or a whiteboard photo does not scale past one age group, and a single wrong line sends the wrong team into the next round. The Gravity Forms Tournament Bracket add-on turns your entries into a proper knockout bracket and keeps it right.

Pick the form, the field with the team or player name and, if you run several age groups or divisions, the field that splits them: you get one bracket per division. Seed by dragging the list, by a random draw from a stored seed (paste the seed back and you get exactly the same draw again) or by a number field such as ranking points. When the number of entrants is not a power of two, the add-on adds byes for the top seeds automatically. Choose single elimination, with an optional 3rd-place match, or double elimination with a losers bracket, a grand final and an optional grand final reset.

Start the tournament and enter scores on the admin bracket: the winner advances automatically, and in double elimination the loser drops into the losers bracket. Made a mistake? Undo a result and the add-on tells you which later results depend on it before it clears them. Put the [ge_tournament_bracket] shortcode on any page for a read-only public bracket that highlights the champion and scrolls inside its own box on phones. A "match is set" notification can e-mail both sides as soon as they know their next opponent, and every bracket exports to CSV. For Gravity Forms 2.9 and newer.

The add-on reads the active entries of the form you pick (spam and trash never take part) and groups them by the division field, so every age group or category gets its own bracket. It saves each entrant's name with the bracket, which keeps the public page fast and stable even if an entry is edited later. The bracket size is the next power of two; the empty places become byes and the standard seed positions give them to the top seeds, so seed 1 meets the lowest seed first and seeds 1 and 2 can only meet in the final. A random draw uses your server's cryptographic generator and keeps its seed, so the same seed and the same entries always give the same draw. The bracket itself stores only the seed order and the results; who plays whom, the byes and the champion are computed from those every time, so the bracket can never disagree with itself. Saving a result checks that nobody else changed the bracket a moment earlier. When a match gets both sides, the add-on runs your "match is set" notification once for each side, with the next match and the opponent in the merge tags. Everything happens on your own server — the add-on makes no outside HTTP request beyond the licence and update checks.