Movie Night Bracket

An 8-title bracket has three rounds: quarterfinals (4 matchups), semifinals (2) and the final. With 20-minute rounds, the whole tournament fits in an evening.

⚡ Quick steps · about an hour

1. Create the tournament. Run /bracket create name:"Friday Frights" max-titles:8.
2. Add 8 titles. Run /bracket manage-titles action:add type:movie title:"The Thing" once per title. After the first, you can leave type out.
3. Announce it. Run /bracket announce so everyone knows a tournament is coming.
4. Open round one. Run /bracket open duration:20m. All 4 quarterfinal matchups open on one ballot, and everyone votes by pressing Start Voting.
5. Repeat for each round. When the 20 minutes are up, voting closes and the winners move on. Run /bracket open duration:20m again for the semifinals, then once more for the final.

Tips

• Short rounds work. Voting can be as short as 5m. Twenty minutes gives people time to see the ballot and vote.
• Ending a round early. If everyone has voted, /bracket close ends it now, without waiting for the deadline.
• Showing the bracket. /bracket view posts the bracket as an image, which is fun to share between rounds.
• Checking time left. Ballots show a live countdown, and anyone can run /bracket status.
• Fewer than 8 titles is fine. With 6, the bracket still has 8 slots, and two titles skip round one (a bye).
• For a meaningful order, choose Ordered seeding in the setup form, so the strongest titles can only meet in the final. See Seeded bracket.

In detail

Why 8?

A straight bracket holds 2–32 titles, and each round halves them. Eight titles give three rounds, each small enough to fit on one ballot. That means /bracket open opens a whole round at once. A ballot holds up to 5 matchups, so bigger rounds are opened in parts; see 32-title bracket.

What voters see

Pressing Start Voting opens a private ballot with one row per matchup: [1A · The Thing] (vs) [1A · Alien]. Each row is its own head-to-head vote. People can change their pick until the round closes. A live standings message shows the running vote counts.

When a matchup ties

The tied titles get a tiebreaker vote, posted in the same channel. It lasts 1 hour, or, when you close the round yourself with /bracket close, whatever you set with tiebreaker-duration. The next round opens once it's settled.

Starting over

/bracket cancel ends the tournament. To run the same lineup again later, first save it with /bracket export format:json, then load it into the setup form.

Related

• One matchup at a time to reveal the matchups one by one
• Tournament FAQ
• Command reference