Playoff weeks and the final bracket
Each block of round robin ends in a playoff week, and the season ends in a bracket. Both follow fixed rules rather than raw standings, which is what makes this format predictable to run.
The playoff week
Every group plays two matches, based on where teams finished the block's round robin:
The top match — rank 1 plays rank 2
The bottom match — the bottom two teams play each other
Those two results decide all the movement:
Outcome | What happens |
|---|---|
Winner of the top match | Promoted up one group |
Loser of the top match | Stays |
Winner of the bottom match | Stays |
Loser of the bottom match | Relegated down one group |
Two teams move per group, and two stay.
The top and bottom groups
Group A has nowhere to promote to, and the bottom group has nowhere to relegate to.
Those matches are still played — they just do not move anyone. What they do is set the order within the group, which matters for the final bracket seeding below.
Larger groups
With groups of more than 4, the teams ranked in the middle have no playoff match that week. They are not idle in the standings — they slot between the stayers, ordered by their final block standings.
Only the top two and bottom two ever play playoff matches, whatever the group size.
The final bracket
After the last block and its playoff, the season finishes with a single-elimination bracket seeded from every team.
Seeding is banded by group. Every team from Group A seeds above every team from Group B, and so on down. A team's group at the end of the season is the biggest factor in where it lands.
Order within each band
Inside a group's band, the order is fixed by rule rather than by record:
The team relegated in from the group above — Group A instead keeps its own top-match winner at #1
The top-match loser
Any middle-ranked teams, best first (groups larger than 4)
The bottom-match winner
The team promoted in from the group below — the bottom group instead keeps its own bottom-match loser at the very bottom
A team relegated into a group seeds at the top of it, and a team promoted into a group seeds at the bottom. That is deliberate: coming down from a stronger group is treated as better than climbing from a weaker one, so a relegated team is not punished twice.
First round
The bracket then pairs standard-seeded — top seed against the lowest, second against second-lowest, so the two best seeds can only meet in the final.
Turning the bracket off
The bracket is enabled by default. Switch it off and the season ends on the final block's standings instead.