🏆 Club competitions (knockout draws)

Run the club’s internal championships — singles, pairs, triples or fours — as a knockout. Enter the players, generate the draw, then record each result as it is played and Pavilion moves the winners through the bracket for you.

Entries and seeds

Add an entry per player or per team. A seed is optional: number your strongest players 1, 2, 3… and leave the rest blank. Seeding keeps the best players apart until the later rounds; without it the whole draw is random, which is perfectly normal for a club competition.

How the draw works

Bowls knockouts need a bracket of 2, 4, 8, 16… so unless your entry count is exactly one of those, some players get a bye — a free pass into round two. Pavilion works out the bracket size, spreads the byes one per pair and gives them to the top seeds in order, which is the standard convention. Six entries, for example, gives two first-round matches and two byes, so four players go into the semi-finals.

Preview before you publish. The wizard shows you the whole first round — every pairing, every seed and every bye — and lets you re-shuffle until you are happy. What you see on screen is exactly what gets saved. Byes are put through to the next round the moment the draw is committed, so nobody is ever left out of the bracket.

Recording results

Click either name in a tie to record it: enter both scores and say who won. The winner goes into the right half of the next round automatically, and when the final is decided the competition is marked completed.

Made a mistake? Click the tie again and record it the other way. Pavilion takes the wrong player back out of the next round, reopens any later tie that they wrongly decided, and puts the competition back to active if it had already been marked finished. A bye has nothing to record, so it cannot be clicked.

Common questions

What is a bye?

A free pass into the next round, given because the number of entries is not a power of two. It is not a walkover awarded against anybody — the player simply has no opponent in round one. Pavilion gives them to the top seeds, and where nobody is seeded, to whoever the shuffle puts at the top of the draw.

Do I have to seed?

No. Leave the seed box blank on every entry and the draw is entirely random. Seed just the players you want kept apart — you do not have to seed everybody.

Can I change a result I have already recorded?

Yes. Click the tie again and record it correctly. The player who was wrongly put through is taken back out of the next round, and if they had already won a later tie that tie is reopened too, so the bracket cannot end up with both names in it.

Can I redo the draw?

Only while no result has been recorded. Once a tie has been played the draw is fixed — clearing it would throw away results people have already played for.

A tie shows 21–0. Is that right?

If that is what happened, yes — a whitewash is recorded and displayed exactly like any other score.

Where do members see it?

Competitions a member has entered appear under My Competitions in the members’ app. An entry that has been withdrawn — including automatically, when somebody resigns — drops off that list.