How to run pool play before the brackets

Teams are divided into pools of three, four or five. Inside a pool everybody plays everybody once, so a pool of four is six matches and three per team. Nobody is eliminated.

When the pools finish, the standings decide the brackets. Say two pools of four with the top two advancing: the first and second of each pool go into a Gold bracket, and the third and fourth into a Silver one. Everybody carries on. That is the whole appeal for a family who drove ninety minutes.

• Under Format, choose Pool play first, then brackets.
• Pick the number of pools. Teams are shared out evenly and the strength is spread: the first seed and the fourth go in one pool, the second and third in the other, so you do not end up with one pool of contenders and one lottery.
• Pick how many go into the top bracket from each pool. Everybody else goes into the second one.
• Enter your teams and build it. You need at least four.

Each pool gets a table with three percentages, which are the ones club volleyball has always used.

• M% is matches won out of matches decided. A drawn match is not counted on either side of that, so a team that drew one and lost two still reads 0%.
• S% is sets won out of sets played.
• Pt% is total points scored divided by total points allowed. A ratio, not a difference.

Teams are ranked on M% first, then S%, then Pt%. That third column decides a pool far more often than people expect, because two teams level on matches and sets is common and then points are all there is.

It is a ratio rather than a points difference on purpose. A set stops at 25, so the damage one lopsided set can do is already capped, and nobody gains anything by running up a score on a team that is already beaten.

At every one of those three steps, if the tie is down to exactly two teams, the one that won the match between them finishes above the other. This is USA Volleyball's procedure and it is the order the standings table uses.

• Two level on M% → the head-to-head winner takes the higher place.
• Three level on M% → S% decides. If that leaves two still level, head-to-head separates those two.
• Three level on M% and S% → Pt% decides, and again head-to-head separates any last two.

Three teams level are never decided by head-to-head, and that is on purpose rather than an omission. A pool where Alpha beat Bravo, Bravo beat Charlie and Charlie beat Alpha happens most weekends, and there is no order hiding in it. A three-way tie goes to the next column instead.

A drawn match is not a head-to-head win for anybody, so two teams who tied each other fall through to the next column as well. That is exactly what happened to second and third in the table above.

Pool matches are usually two sets, played out, with no decider. One set each is a real result and it is accepted. It counts as neither a win nor a loss, and both teams keep the points and sets from it.

Bracket matches are different. Those have to produce a winner, and a level score is refused there, because somebody has to go through.

This is the part worth knowing. Both brackets are drawn the moment you build the tournament, with their slots reading 1st, Pool A and 2nd, Pool B rather than sitting empty.

So you can publish the link and print the sheet on Friday night, before a ball has been served. As each pool finishes, its slots fill in with real team names on their own. You do not press anything.

The first round is arranged across pools, so the winner of one pool meets the runner-up of another and two teams from the same pool cannot meet again immediately.

• No courts or time slots. You can put a time and a place on each match, but there is no courts-by-time grid.
• No work team assignment. If your tournament has teams line judging and scoring each other's matches, that is still a job for a separate sheet.
• Pools cannot be edited by hand. They are drawn from the seeding when you build, and changing them means building again.

See scoring in sets for how set scores are entered, and sharing your bracket for what the public page shows.