How to enter scores and advance teams

Type both scores and save. The winner is placed into whichever game it feeds, and in a double elimination bracket the loser drops into the losers bracket rather than disappearing.

You never place teams yourself. Every game already knows where its winner goes and where its loser goes, worked out when the bracket was generated, so a score is the only input the bracket needs.

You can change a score you have already entered. If nothing downstream has happened yet, it simply updates.

This is the situation worth understanding before it happens at seven in the evening. A wrong result in round one does not stay in round one: the team that should have advanced did not, and everything that team would have played is now fiction.

The honest answer is that there is no version of this that does not cause disruption. The software can recalculate the bracket; it cannot un-play the games. What it gives you is a clear statement of what is about to be undone, so you can decide whether to correct the record or let it stand.

Since a late correction is genuinely painful, a few habits are worth more here than in most of the product.

• One person enters scores. Decided in advance, not worked out on the day.
• Take the score from a scorecard, not from memory, and definitely not from a parent who watched the end.
• Check the bracket after each round, not at the end of the day. A wrong result caught within the round costs you one correction; caught two rounds later it costs you an argument.
• Enter the losing score too. It is what proves the result later when somebody disputes it.

A team's wins and losses are derived from the games it has played rather than kept as a running total. There is no counter to correct, so fixing a score fixes every record that depended on it at the same moment.

Everything you enter appears on the public tournament page as soon as it is saved. There is nothing to publish again and no second step.

See sharing your bracket.