Glossary

Bracket — the knockout tree. Winners advance; losers are out. Also called the elimination rounds.

Bye — a free pass. In a knockout it means advancing without playing, because the field is not a power of two; byes go to the top seeds. In a round-robin with an odd number of teams it means sitting out a round.

Category — a division of the tournament with its own standings and bracket. Teams in different categories never meet.

Club — the organisation a team represents. Used for crests, contacts, and for keeping a club's teams from clashing in the schedule.

Double round-robin — a round-robin played twice, home and away, so every pairing occurs two times.

Draft — a tournament that has not been published. Visible only inside your organisation.

Fixture — a pairing: who plays whom. A fixture becomes a scheduled match when it gets a pitch and a time.

Goal difference — goals for minus goals against. The usual first tiebreaker between teams level on points.

Group — a round-robin pool inside a category. Group standings decide who advances.

Group stage — the round-robin phase that precedes a bracket.

Knockout — single-elimination: lose once and you are out.

Match card — a printable card for one match, carrying a QR code that opens its scoring screen.

Organisation — the club, federation or committee hosting the tournament. Your account belongs to one.

Pitch — one playing surface. It can host one match at a time, and it has its own availability.

Plate — a secondary bracket for the teams that did not qualify for the main knockout, so nobody stops playing early.

Publishing — making a tournament visible on the public results site.

Rest — the idle time between one team's consecutive matches. Usually the most expensive scheduling constraint.

Revision — a snapshot of the schedule you can restore. Take one before a significant re-solve.

Round — in a round-robin, one set of fixtures in which every team plays at most once. In a knockout, one stage of the bracket, named for the number of teams starting it (round of 16, quarter-final, semi-final, final).

Round-robin — every team in a group plays every other team.

Seeding — ranking teams before the draw so the strongest are kept apart. In a bracket, top seed plays bottom seed.

Serpentine — the distribution that spreads strength evenly across groups by snaking through the ranked list: 1, 2, 3, 4 / 4, 3, 2, 1.

Standings — the group table: played, won, drawn, lost, goals for and against, goal difference, points.

Strength — an optional per-team seeding number, 1 being the strongest, used to distribute teams into balanced or stratified groups.

Timeslot — a start time on a pitch. The tournament day, match length and gap between matches produce the grid the scheduler fills.

Tournament day — one date of the tournament, with its own playing hours and its own schedule.

Venue — a site with pitches. A tournament can use several.