Plan the schedule before generating
Twelve teams playing each other once needs 66 matches. Most events do a short group stage — generate four pools of three with the per-team mode, or jump straight to a 16-team bracket.
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Split your list into 12 teams
Twelve teams is the sweet spot for tournaments that want short matches and many parallel games — paste your list and we will handle the rotation.
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The free version does the job. The optional template pack just makes brackets look beautiful for events, classrooms and clubs.
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When to use this
Used for school field days with 12 coloured-bib stations, six-court padel mornings, and conference workshops where two facilitators each manage six tables. Twelve also seeds nicely into a 16-team bracket with four byes.
Step by step
- 1
Paste names
- 2
Generate 12 teams
- 3
Send to bracket or print
Tip: name the teams
Switch the naming scheme to colours or animals so participants remember which side they're on without looking at a sheet.
What 'fair' actually means here
When we say a split is fair we mean two specific things. First, team sizes differ by at most one — never by two — regardless of how the headcount divides. Second, in skill-balanced mode the total rating per team stays within roughly one rating point of the average. Those are mathematical guarantees of the algorithm, not marketing language. If you want to verify, generate the same input twice with different seeds: the per-team totals will land in the same narrow band each time. Pure-random mode trades that balance for surprise — useful when the ratings are noisy or the activity is recreational. Read the full algorithm description on the methodology page if you want the snake-draft maths.
Practical tips before you paste
Three small habits make the output noticeably better. (1) Strip leading numbers and bullets from your list — paste plain names, one per line, so the parser doesn't treat '1. Alex' as a name. (2) If you have ratings, append them after the name with a space, e.g. 'Alex 4'. The generator accepts integers and decimals from 1 to 10. (3) Decide up-front whether absentees should be excluded or kept as ghosts. Excluding gives tighter teams; keeping them lets you swap names back in later without regenerating. The 'Copy as text' button preserves your line order so you can edit and re-paste.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Can I do pools of 3?
Yes — switch the mode to "people per team" and set 3. The generator will create as many groups of 3 as your list allows.
Is anything sent to your servers?
No. The team generator runs entirely in your browser using JavaScript. The names you paste are kept in component memory only and are never transmitted, logged, or persisted unless you explicitly export them. Closing the tab clears the data. See the privacy and methodology pages for the technical detail.
Can I lock specific people onto the same team?
Yes. After generating, click any name to swap it with another, or use drag and drop in the team panel. For one-off groupings (siblings, carpool partners) this is the fastest path. For repeated locks across many regenerations, give the locked group a shared rating that's slightly above average and use balanced mode — they'll cluster together most of the time.
Why do I sometimes get the same split twice?
On very small inputs (under ~10 names) there are only a handful of mathematically distinct splits, so repeats are inevitable. The shuffle is cryptographically random — it's just that the space of valid outputs is small. Either add more names or accept the duplicate; either is fine.
Keep exploring
Related tools & guides
Split your list into 10 teams
Pasting a roster of 30–100 people and splitting it into ten balanced squads is a job for a generator, not a clipboard.
Open16-team bracket template
Sixteen teams, fifteen matches, four rounds. The classic championship sheet.
OpenRound robin alternative: try a single-elim bracket
Round-robin guarantees every team plays every other — but it eats time. For one-afternoon events, a bracket is usually the better call.
OpenSchool tournament bracket
Built for teachers and PE staff who need a clean printed bracket for sports day, inter-class finals, or after-school clubs.
Open
Ready to run your event?
Free forever for basic use. No signup required. The free version really does do the job.
Want prettier prints? See the optional template pack