How Snapdown orders tournament rounds

A tournament round is a stage of the event, not a stage of one bracket. Each round holds the bracket rounds that are allowed to run at the same time, so a 16-man quarterfinal and a 5-man round robin’s second round can share one tournament round and run side by side on different mats.

Snapdown generates this order for you. You do not have to configure anything to get a sensible order. In System Managed it is worked out each time you publish. In Director Managed it is saved when you switch modes, and the Round order button on Match Publishing shows it: Round order: Balanced for the generated order, Round order: Custom once you’ve edited it.

What the ordering does

Brackets are not the same length. An 8-man wrestleback needs four tournament waves, while a 5-man round robin needs five. If every bracket simply ran its rounds back to back, the short brackets would finish early and their wrestlers would sit, while the deep brackets would still be working.

The generated order is called Balanced. Snapdown lines up each bracket’s rounds by how far they are from that bracket’s finish, so short brackets start earlier instead of piling up at the end. If every bracket is the same depth, there is nothing to balance and the rounds simply run in order.

Snapdown spreads each bracket across the whole event, in proportion to how deep it is. Deeper brackets appear more often and shorter brackets are spaced further apart. A bracket’s placement bouts stay together as that bracket’s final wave, but Snapdown does not hold every bracket’s placements until one event-wide Finals round. A shorter bracket can award its places while a deeper round robin still has another round to wrestle.

Reading the generated order

A mixed event with 8-man wrestlebacks and 5-man round robins generates five tournament rounds:

Tournament round	8-man wrestleback	5-man round robin
1	Quarterfinal	Round 1
2	Semifinal, Cons. Round 1	Round 2
3	Cons. Round 2	Round 3
4 · Finals	1st Place, 3rd Place	Round 4
5		Round 5

Three things are worth noticing.

The wrestleback appears four times and the round robin five, because that is how many trips each format takes. The 1st- and 3rd-place bouts share one placement wave instead of becoming separate trailing rounds. That wave is the wrestleback’s finish, but it is not the event’s final wave—the round robin still has Round 5.

This does not take away placement control. Finals means the bout deciding 1st place. A placement bout means any bout deciding a positive place, such as 1st, 3rd, or 5th. When you create assignment rules, you can keep every placement bout in the main queue, exclude all of them, or select exact placements for separate mats.

Within one tournament round, bouts run division by division in your division order, then by bracket order inside each division.

Why a bracket sometimes runs two rounds in a row

In a deep field the longest bracket will occasionally take consecutive tournament rounds. That is almost always fine, and it is worth knowing why before you rearrange anything.

Within a tournament round, a mat runs one bracket’s matches and then the next bracket’s. So the matches separating a wrestler’s two bouts are the other brackets of the same format. Three 16-man brackets means a wrestler in the first one has roughly sixteen matches between their consolation round and their next bout, even though the two tournament rounds are adjacent.

It only becomes real rest that a wrestler would notice when all of the following are true:

the event has just one bracket of that format,
it takes two consecutive tournament rounds, and
nothing else is assigned to its mat.

If that describes a division at your event, put another bracket on the same mat rather than reordering the tournament rounds.

Change the order yourself

In Director Managed, choose Round order on Match Publishing to open Round Order, which shows the sequence and every bracket round inside each one.

Move a round earlier or later with the up and down arrows.
Rename a round when the schedule is posted for families to read.
Choose Reset to Balanced to discard your changes and regenerate the order.
Choose Save Changes to keep your edits. The button then reads Round order: Custom.

When bracket types change

Rounds cover the formats in play: every bracket the event has, plus each division’s bracket types, so you can arrange rounds before brackets are generated. Growing or regrouping a bracket inside its division’s list doesn’t change the rounds at all.

When a new format does show up (a division gets a new type, or you pick a one-off format for a bracket), a generated order simply regenerates. A custom order keeps everything you arranged, and Snapdown slots the new bracket rounds in beside the rounds the same distance from their finish: a new semifinal joins your semifinal round, and opening rounds go in before later ones. Merged rounds carry a New badge in Round Order, and Match Publishing and the Event Dashboard show Round order updated until you review and save. Scheduling keeps working in the meantime.

Apply a new order to published bouts

Reordering doesn’t change bouts that are already numbered and queued. To apply it, choose Run… on the affected plans and turn on Renumber everything (new numbers in the new order) and Put back in running order (queue follows the new order). On the Mats step, Replace what’s waiting reloads the mats in that order; Not yet leaves the mats alone for now. Bouts that have started or finished keep their numbers and places.