A tournament in Cue Ball Network is not a single bracket. It is a graph of phases connected by transitions: whoever finishes a phase in a given place moves into the next one. The same mechanism handles a plain 16-player knockout, groups followed by a bracket, double elimination with a grand final and richer formats with a third-place match or a consolation event. Below we describe the building blocks an organizer assembles a format from, and what happens automatically while play is on.

Four phase types

• Groups (GROUPS). The field is split into groups and everyone in a group plays everyone else. The organizer fixes one number, the group count or the group size, and the other follows from the field. A group holds 3 to 10 players. Too few players for the chosen number of groups means the phase cannot be played in that shape; too many players in a group is refused as well, because a round robin in a group of twelve is 66 matches.
• Round robin (ROUND_ROBIN). Everyone against everyone, one standings table for the whole field. Useful for small events or as a final phase.
• Single elimination (SINGLE_KO). The classic bracket. A field that is not a power of two gets byes in the first round.
• Double elimination (DOUBLE_KO). A player is out after the second loss. It has two modes. In the full mode nobody is out before their second loss right to the end, so the grand final may need a reset: the winners-bracket player arrives unbeaten and losing the first final only levels both at one loss. In the "single elimination from" mode double elimination runs up to a named stage (for example the quarter-finals) and single elimination takes over from there. The stage where the merge happens is set by the tournament organizer, not by the template.

Transitions: who goes on

A transition connects a source phase with a target phase and says which places advance. There are two readings, depending on what the source is:

• When the source is groups, places mean places within every group. "Places 1 and 2" means the first and the second of each group. For unevenly sized groups you can add exceptions: three advance from the groups of six, two from the group of five.
• When the source is a bracket or a round robin, places mean the finishing places of the whole phase: first, second, shared third and fourth. A place pointing inside a shared range selects nobody rather than picking arbitrarily.

Three modifiers come on top. "Invert" selects everyone except the named places. "Take N" narrows the selection to the best or the worst N of the chosen set. "Remaining" is a separate kind of transition that collects everyone no other transition from the same phase has taken. Two transitions from the same phase cannot name the same places, and there can be only one "remaining" per phase.

Out of these blocks you build, for example: groups whose top two go to the main bracket and everyone else to a consolation bracket; or semi-finals whose winners play the final and whose losers play for third place.

The graph has rules

A format must have exactly one initial phase, that is one no transition leads into. The whole field enters it at the start. The graph cannot contain cycles: a phase cannot feed itself or a phase that comes before it. Every transition must point at existing phases. The system checks all of this on every save and refuses to store a graph that makes no sense; whether a given field can play it is checked by the pre-start checklist.

Administrators maintain format templates. When an organizer creates a tournament, the chosen template is copied into the tournament as its own configuration. Later changes to the template no longer touch existing tournaments, and the organizer can edit their copy in the tournament settings until the first match of that phase begins. After the tournament starts, phases can no longer be added or removed, only reconfigured.

Race to and phase names

Every phase has its own "race to", the number of racks a match is played to. In brackets you can set a different race to per round, for example a longer final. In groups you can do the same per group. The number of rounds these settings are shown for follows from the number of confirmed players (before that, entered players, and before anybody has entered, the participant limit) and the transitions between phases. Phases can also carry names in several languages ("Main bracket", "Consolation") that appear wherever the phase is referenced.

What happens during the tournament

When the tournament starts, the confirmed players are drawn into the initial phase, and from then on everything that follows from entered results happens automatically. After every result the system runs the same pass:

1. It seats the winner and the loser into the matches waiting for them.
2. It settles matches nobody has to play: a bye, or a walkover when the opponent never materialized. A walkover has a winner but no loser, so its effects cascade down the bracket.
3. It checks which phases have finished all their matches and moves players through the transitions into phases whose every source has finished.
4. It draws those new phases and marks the finished phases as completed.

These steps feed each other, so the pass repeats until nothing changes. Running it twice breaks nothing, which is why it can be invoked after every change. A phase completes only when all its entrants are known: either it is the initial phase or every phase feeding it has completed.

Several phases can run at the same time. There is no "current phase". A consolation phase can be played alongside the main bracket, and a phase in which nothing has been played yet stays editable.

Draw and seeding

Randomness enters once per phase, and only when that phase is handed its players: the confirmed entrants are shuffled into the first phase at the start, and the qualifiers are shuffled again as each later phase is filled. Everything the phase draws follows from that one order, so re-drawing a phase whose players are already seated reproduces the same fixtures. A correction that changes how many players a later phase receives is the exception: that phase is emptied and drawn afresh, from a new order. A correction that changes who qualifies but not how many is handled more gently: the arriving player takes the departing player's seat and only the matches that seat touches are reset.

When groups feed a bracket the draw is additionally constrained: the system avoids a first-round meeting of two players from the same group, and of two players who finished in the same place in their groups, wherever such an arrangement exists.

Ties in tables

Groups and round robins end with a table, and a table needs tie-breaking. The organizer orders the criteria (head-to-head, rack difference and so on). The criteria are applied as successive splits: the first one that actually separates the tied players divides them into buckets, and whatever stays level goes on to the next criterion. If a tie remains after all criteria, a penalty shootout (a series of single shots) decides, or, if the organizer switched the shootout off, the group's draw order does.

Correcting results

A typo in an entered result does not have to ruin the tournament. A correction rolls back everything derived from that result: automatic settlements disappear silently, and matches that have already been played on the basis of the wrong result are pointed out to the organizer before confirming, because their results will be withdrawn too.

At the end: the classification

When the tournament is closed, the places taken in the individual phases become a final classification for every path that ends the tournament (for example one for the main bracket and one for the consolation), one of which is the main ranking. A player is ranked by the deepest phase they played in. A third-place match is treated specially so its winner is third rather than above the finalists.