Drawing the Tournament
Choose how each division is drawn, generate the brackets, and lay them out on the mats.
Once your divisions exist, the Draw the tournament wizard turns them into real brackets. It's four steps: confirm the divisions, choose a format for each, generate and review, then spread them across the mats.
The four steps
Confirm divisions
Check the divisions and their athlete counts. If one is missing entrants or shouldn't be drawn yet, fix it on the Divisions tab first.
Choose the draw
Each division gets a recommended format and a live preview of what it produces. Change any of them from the dropdown — the preview updates instantly.
Review & approve
Generate every division's draw in one click and review the result. Not happy with one? Change its format and re-generate.
Mats
Auto-allocate balances the divisions' fights across your mats; override any division onto a specific mat if you prefer. Then Done — the tournament is drawn.
Draw formats
The default for each division follows the IJF Sport Organisation Rules for its size, but you can pick any of these:
Pools + crossover
For small draws. Athletes are split into round-robin pools, then the pool winners meet for gold and the runners-up for bronze. Example: five athletes → a pool of three and a pool of two → three medals.
Single elimination (+ repechage)
A seeded knockout bracket. For larger draws it adds repechage so athletes beaten by the finalists fight back for a double bronze — standard judo medalling.
Round robin
Everyone fights everyone; placings come from the standings. Good for very small or development divisions where maximising matches matters.
Ladder
A progressive ladder with configurable win thresholds — used for gradings and belt-based events rather than standard weight divisions.
Club separation & seeding
In step 2, each division has a Keep clubmates apart option. Turn it on and the draw seeds same-club competitors into opposite halves of the bracket, so teammates meet as late as possible — ideally not until a final. It works for brackets and pools alike.
You can also choose how entrants are ranked before the draw — by their existing seed, by belt, randomly, or by competitive aptitude — so the strongest competitors are spread across the draw rather than clustered.
Tip: Club separation is only as good as your club data — it relies on competitors' clubs being recorded, which happens automatically from the club field on registration and CSV import.