- published: 16 Mar 2015
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A bracket is a tree diagram that represents the series of games played during a tournament, named as such because it appears to be a large number of interconnected (punctuational) brackets.
There are several kinds of brackets, adapted to different types of tournaments. The most common are:
The "art" of filling in brackets, especially in NCAA basketball, is referred to as bracketology.
Brackets are commonly found in major North American professional sports leagues. Often, at the end of the regular season, the league holds a post-season tournament (most commonly called a playoff) to determine which team is the best out of all of the other teams in the league. This is done because often in professional sports there are at least two different conferences, and teams mostly play other teams in their own conference. Examples of this are the American Football Conference and the National Football Conference in the NFL, the American League and the National League in Major League Baseball, and the Eastern Conference and the Western Conference in the NBA or NHL.
Brackets are tall punctuation marks used in matched pairs within text, to set apart or interject other text. Used unqualified, brackets refer to different types of brackets in different parts of the world and in different contexts.
The chevron was the earliest type to appear in written English. Desiderius Erasmus coined the term lunula to refer to the rounded parentheses (), recalling the round shape of the moon.
In addition to referring to the class of all types of brackets, the unqualified word bracket is most commonly used to refer to a specific type of bracket. In modern American usage this is usually the square bracket.
In American usage, parentheses are usually considered separate from other brackets, and calling them "brackets" at all is unusual even though they serve a similar function. In more formal usage "parenthesis" may refer to the entire bracketed text, not just to the punctuation marks used (so all the text in this set of round brackets may be said to be a parenthesis or a parenthetical).
A tournament is a competition involving a relatively large number of competitors, all participating in a sport or game. More specifically, the term may be used in either of two overlapping senses:
These two senses are distinct. All golf tournaments meet the first definition, but while match play tournaments meet the second, stroke play tournaments do not, since there are no distinct matches within the tournament. In contrast, football (soccer) leagues like the Premier League are tournaments in the second sense, but not the first, having matches spread across many stadia over a period of up to a year. Many tournaments meet both definitions; for example, the Wimbledon tennis championship.
A tournament-match (or tie or fixture or heat) may involve multiple game-matches (or rubbers or legs) between the competitors. For example, in the Davis Cup tennis tournament, a tie between two nations involves five rubbers between the nations' players. The team that wins the most rubbers wins the tie. In the later rounds of UEFA Champions League of football (soccer), each fixture is played over two legs. The scores of each leg are added, and the team with the higher aggregate score wins the fixture, with away goals used as a tiebreaker and a penalty shootout if away goals cannot determine a winner.
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