Some of us at some point have wondered while looking at a bracket, “so there’s single-elim and double-elim, what about triple-elimination?” I had played around with the idea in my head and drew out some possible ideas for what it might look like but never fully fleshed it out. About 2 weeks ago, I saw a facebook status by Ankoku/aisight/Tony Cheng saying that anyone successfully running a triple elimination bracket would have his enduring admiration and respect. This was the motivation I needed. I had my triple-elim bracket design finished that night, posted that I wanted to try it at the next Norcal tournament, and got the OK from the community. We ran the triple-elim bracket on Apr 12 with 55 entrants and it was a fantastic success. We somehow finished it in under 6 hours, thanks to having 14 setups and the hard work of all the Norcal helpers *shoutouts to Mama Ko* So how does a triple-elim bracket work? What do you need to do to run one successfully? I’ll be describing how the whole thing works and referring to different rounds of different brackets, so you can look at what we did at the Norcal tournament as an example to follow along:

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