Team Tournaments (NvM)

Not every game is a duel. Braket runs team tournaments too, and it runs them without changing anything you already know about brackets, standings, or trophies. A team is just a player-shaped thing that happens to have several people inside it.

What "NvM" means

When a studio creates a tournament, they decide how many players each side fields. The classic case is 1v1, one player against one player, and if that is the setup you will never see any of the team machinery at all: you register as yourself and play as yourself.

But the studio can set any team size. Straightforward cases are 2v2 or 5v5, where both sides field the same number. Braket also supports flexible rosters, where the studio sets a minimum and a maximum, say "at least 3, at most 5." That is the "NvM" in the name: N players a side, M the ceiling, and everything in between is legal. The tournament page shows you the size right at the top, next to the tournament name, so you always know what you are signing up for.

Registering means forming a squad

In a team tournament, you do not register as an individual. You register by being on a team, and there are two ways to get onto one.

You can create a team. You give it a name, and that name has to be unique within the tournament, so pick something memorable. When you create a team you become its captain, and creating the team registers you into the tournament in one move. Your team now appears in the list of registered teams for others to find and join.

Or you can join an existing team. The tournament page shows every team, its current roster, and how full it is. If a team has room and you are not already on another team, one click adds you to its roster. You can only be on one team per tournament, so choose your crew before you commit.

Captains and rosters

Every team has exactly one captain: the person who created it. The captain matters in a quiet, structural way. Under the hood, the captain's identity is the team's identity in the bracket, which is the neat trick that lets Braket run team tournaments through the exact same bracket, standings, and trophy code it uses for 1v1. You do not need to think about that, but it explains one important rule.

Any member of the roster can act on the team's behalf. Readying up, reporting a result, confirming your opponent's report, opening a dispute: any of these can be done by any roster member, and it counts for the whole side. You do not have to wait for the captain to be online to play your match. Whoever is at the keyboard can drive.

Leaving a team is done from the tournament page while registration is open. If a regular member leaves, they simply come off the roster and free up a slot. If the captain leaves, the team disbands entirely, because the captain is the team's anchor, and its registration is released. So captains, think twice before you walk; you are taking the whole squad with you.

The minimum roster to enter

This is the one rule that surprises people, so it is worth stating clearly. Your team must reach the minimum roster size to actually compete.

You can create a team early and let it fill up over the registration window. That is normal and expected. But when registration closes and the tournament launches, Braket checks every team. Any team that has not reached the minimum number of players is excluded from the bracket. A half-empty squad does not get to field a lonely player against full teams; it simply does not make it in. The tournament page flags whether your team is short of the minimum while registration is open, so keep an eye on it and recruit until you are safely over the line. Teams at or above the minimum are locked and loaded; teams above the maximum cannot exist, because the join button disappears once a roster is full.

What a team wins

When your team does well, the rewards are not the captain's alone. Trophies and ladder placements fan out to every member of the roster. If your 3-player squad takes the gold, all three of you get the trophy and the ladder points, not just whoever happened to be captain. A team victory is a victory for everyone who fielded for it.

Everywhere a player would normally appear (group standings, the bracket, match cards, the podium) your team's name shows instead, so a team tournament reads exactly like a solo one, just with squads where the individuals would be. The rest of this documentation, from readying up to reporting results, applies to your team without a single asterisk. When it says "you," in a team tournament read it as "your side," and you are good.