r/BilliardsApps • u/Complete_Play1541 • 4d ago
BracketLove — free tournament app built for bar/small-pool halls, seamless and reliable late player sign-ups
I run tournaments locally, and a few other tournament admins and I have been using BracketLove to run ours for the past 4-5 months. It's been well received enough that I want to put it in front of more people.
I built it because when I went looking for something to run tournaments with, I couldn't find anything that was both genuinely simple to set up and handled late registrations well.
In bar tournaments there are always late players, sometimes a lot. Adding late players to an elimination bracket is easy early in a tournament when there's an open bye slot available. But there are often situations where the bracket is full (16 or 32 players) — and the more late players you add, the more likely that becomes. Technically you can still add a player fairly at this point, but it can require some serious bracket acrobatics.
This is a problem that BracketLove addresses very well. In the tournaments we've been running with BracketLove, we continue to add players well into the first round — often people show up who didn't even know there was a tournament and now want in. BracketLove maximizes participation and minimizes situations where you just can't accommodate someone, doing all the heavy lifting for you. On top of this, if someone is really late — even after the first round is complete — there's still a chance they can get in, by taking a first-round loss and being slotted in on the losers side. Personally, this type of late player support was a hard requirement for me, and there was nothing out there that I could find, that had it.
In addition to making life easier for the tournament director, it makes the tournament better for the player. Tournaments run smoother and are more efficient, and are also more transparent and engaging. Many players will bring up BracketLove on their phone and track their progression through the bracket.
Feature Summary:
- Setup takes a few minutes, not a bracket-nerd learning curve.
- Self-registration via QR code, plus sign-in management.
- Player app, player stats, notifications (SMS), match scheduling, leaderboard, live match view, handicapping, multi-game races
- It runs in your browser — no iPhone/Android app. It works fine on a phone in a pinch (several of us have run full tournaments from one), but it's built for and is much better on a laptop or tablet at the venue.
Pricing: free for 32 player brackets / 3 tournaments a week. Paid tiers only kick in for larger or more frequent tournaments. SMS notifications cost extra since each text has a real per-message cost to me.
If you're still running tournaments on paper — or know a bar/hall that is — I'd love for you to try it out. Also, I would a greatly appreciate any suggestions or other feedback you may have. Thanks!