One being that you are guaranteeing the teams to play at least two games, as opposed to running a single elimination tournament. The championship match in the consolation bracket will determine 3rd and 4th places.Ī consolation tournament has a couple advantages over some of the other formats.

If you are defeated while in the consolation bracket you are out of the tournament. This is slightly different than a Double Elimination Tournament Bracket in that once you are in the consolation bracket you have no chance of winning the tournament. The championship of the winners bracket will decide the 1st and 2nd place finishers(the loser of the winner's bracket final does not go to the consolation bracket, they are automatically awarded 2nd place. The difference here is once a person or team loses in the winners bracket they will drop down to the consolation bracket where they will battle it out for 3rd place. As mentioned above the losers of the first round will go to the consolation bracket and the winner's will remain in the winner's bracket. The brackets you see listed above allow teams to 'Playback' to 3rd place after losing. You can see an example of this with our 8 Team Consolation Tournament Bracket. Once a person or team is in one of those brackets, that's where you will stay for the remainder of the tournament. One way to run a consolation tournament is to have the losers in the first round move to the consolation bracket and the winners move to the winner's bracket. There are quite a few variations of a consolation tournament.

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