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 when you publish, and shows it under Manage Tournament Rounds on Match Publishing. You do not have to configure anything to get a sensible order.

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.

Snapdown spreads each bracket across the whole event instead, 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.

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

Choose Manage Tournament Rounds on Match Publishing to see the generated 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 Current Bracket Types to discard your changes and regenerate from the brackets the event actually has now.

Saved rounds stay saved. Adding brackets later does not silently reshuffle a sequence you arranged, which is also why the reset button exists: after a division changes shape, regenerating is how the new brackets get folded in.

Rebuild assignment groups after reordering

Reordering changes the order used for numbering and assignment groups. Return to Match Publishing, use Apply Numbering when bout numbers should change, and then Build Assignment Group for the affected rules. Building is plan-only and does not clear a live mat. Use Apply on the planned mat when the replacement group is ready.