single-elimination tournament

A single-elimination knockout, or sudden-death tournament is a type of elimination tournament where the loser of a match-up is immediately eliminated from the tournament. Each winner will play another in the next round, until the final match-up, whose winner becomes the tournament champion(s). Some match-ups may be a single match or several, for example two-legged ties in European sports or best-of series in North American pro sports. Defeated competitors may play no further part after losing, or may participate in "consolation" or "classification" matches against other losers to determine the lower final rankings; for example, a third place playoff between losing semi-finalists. In a shootout poker tournament, there are more than two players competing at each table, and sometimes more than one progresses to the next round. Some competitions are held with a pure single-elimination tournament system. Others have many phases, with the last being a single-elimination final stage, often called playoffs.

The format is widely used in racket-based sports (including tennis and badminton), in major combat sport tournaments (including wrestling and amateur boxing), and in association football and handball where it is used for many of the annual cup tournaments that are played alongside the national round-robin tournament leagues. In North American team sports, the format is most known from the NCAA basketball championships.