Twelve teams of two arrive at nine on a Saturday. You have a hall, six classrooms, a stack of ballots and a promise that the final will finish before four. Between those two points sit three preliminary rounds, a break, three knockout rounds and roughly six moments where somebody will ask whether the draw was fair. This guide walks through the whole day with three tools: the debate topic generator for the motions, the debate pairer for opponents and sides, and the tournament bracket for the knockout. Each one does a single job, and the day goes smoothly when you know exactly where each job ends and yours begins.
The shape of the day
Before touching a tool, fix the schedule, because the schedule decides how many draws you need.
| Time | Round | Debates | Motion draws |
|---|---|---|---|
| 9:30 | Prelim 1 | 6 | 1 |
| 10:45 | Prelim 2 | 6 | 1 |
| 12:30 | Prelim 3 | 6 | 1 |
| 1:45 | Quarterfinals (top 8) | 4 | 1 |
| 2:45 | Semifinals | 2 | 1 |
| 3:30 | Final | 1 | 1 |
Six motions, eighteen preliminary debates, seven knockout debates. Every team debates three times before the break, and the eight that break debate up to three more. Four teams go home at lunch with nothing more to do than eat the sandwiches, which is why the break announcement wants to be quick and clearly fair.
Motions: draw them in public, one round at a time
The topic generator holds three banks of 30 motions each: School, Funny and Classic. For a club tournament, Classic is the natural bank for the preliminaries, and Funny is a decent choice for a novice side event or for the lunch break. Choose the bank with the Category dropdown and press Get a topic.
The setting that matters is the checkbox labelled No repeats until the list runs out. With it ticked, the tool keeps a list of the motions it has already given you for that category, in your browser, and draws only from the rest. When all 30 are used it empties the list and starts again. With it unticked, every draw is from the full 30.
That difference is bigger than it sounds over a whole day. Six independent draws from 30 motions contain at least one repeat about 41% of the time. Having the semifinal draw the motion the room already argued in round two is the sort of thing a sharp-eyed coach will raise, and they would be right to. So tick the box before the first draw.
Two practical notes about that box:
- The tick survives a reload. The tool saves both the checkbox and the memory of used motions in your browser, so if the laptop sleeps over lunch and you reload, the box is still ticked for the quarterfinal draw. Glance at it anyway before each draw.
- The memory persists across days and is shared by every event you run on that browser. If you ran a practice night last week with Classic and no-repeats on, those motions are still marked used. Press Clear history before the tournament starts: on this site that also wipes the tool’s no-repeat memory, so the day begins with all 30 available.
Draw each motion at the start of its round, with the screen projected, rather than drawing all six at breakfast. Prep time only means something if nobody saw the motion early, and a projected draw takes the question “who picked this?” off the table. The Recent results panel keeps the last ten draws, so by the final you have a record of all six motions on the same screen.
Prelim pairings: the pairer has no memory
Paste the twelve team names into the debate pairer, one per line, and press Pair and assign sides. It shuffles the list, takes the teams two at a time, and flips a fair coin for each match to decide who is PRO and who is CON. You get six match cards. That is the whole of round one, and it is exactly what you want: no seeding, no history, every pairing equally likely.
Round two is where the planning starts. The pairer has no memory of round one, and it has no seed option, so pressing the button again gives you a completely fresh, independent draw. That means rematches happen by chance, and more often than people guess:
- With twelve teams, a fresh round-two draw repeats at least one round-one matchup 42% of the time.
- Across all three preliminary rounds, at least one rematch somewhere happens about 82% of the time (from a simulation of 200,000 tournaments).
- On average, round three repeats about 1.1 of the twelve matchups the teams have already had.
The fix is cheap. Keep the previous round’s match cards on a sheet beside you. Draw the new round, compare, and if any pair has met before, draw again. For round two the chance of a clean draw is 58%, so you will usually need one or two presses. If you would rather not redraw in front of the room, swap opponents by hand between two affected matches and say so out loud. The post on multi-round tournaments goes deeper into the bookkeeping; for a three-round day the redraw rule is enough.
Sides need the same care
The PRO/CON coin is fair per debate, which means it is unfair per team in a predictable way. Each team has a one-in-four chance of landing the same side in all three prelims, so with twelve teams you should expect about three teams to argue only PRO or only CON all morning. The chance that at least one team does is 97%.
Most clubs want each team to argue both sides at least once before the break. The workable rule: from round two on, check the sides against your sheet. Where a team would argue the same side for the third time, swap the sides in that match. When both teams in a match have the same history, the coin’s result stands, because one of them has to repeat. Announce the rule at registration so a swap looks like policy and not like favouritism.
Odd numbers of teams
If a thirteenth team turns up, the pairer does what it does with any odd list: the leftover joins the last match as a THIRD SPEAKER. That is fine for individual speakers in a class, and wrong for a team format. Add a line that reads BYE to make the list even. Whoever is paired with BYE sits the round out and is scored by your club’s rule for byes. With thirteen teams plus the BYE line, each team has a 1-in-13 chance of drawing it each round, and you should check it against your sheet like any other matchup so no team sits out twice.
The break: decide the rules before lunch
Rank teams after round three by wins, then by speaker points or whatever tiebreak your club uses. Publish the tiebreak rule at registration, not at lunch. The top eight break to the quarterfinals.
Now the decision that shapes the afternoon: ranked or random knockout seeding.
- Ranked seeding (1 v 8, 4 v 5, 3 v 6, 2 v 7) rewards the morning. You do not need a tool for it; write the bracket by hand from the tab.
- Random seeding treats the break as the reward and the knockout as a fresh start. This is what the bracket tool does.
The tournament bracket shuffles your entrants and gives the shuffled list seeds 1 to 8, then lays them out in standard bracket order. With exactly eight teams there are no byes, and each first-round opponent is equally likely. Two teams from the same school meet in the quarterfinals with probability 1 in 7, and land in opposite halves of the bracket, where they can only meet in the final, with probability 4 in 7.
If you break six teams instead of eight, the tool rounds up to an eight-slot bracket and gives the two byes to the highest seeds of the shuffled order, so every bye faces a real team and no match is bye against bye. Under random seeding, any one of the six teams gets a bye with probability 1 in 3, which is a strong argument for breaking eight or four rather than six.
Make the knockout draw checkable
The bracket tool has a Seed field. Type any phrase there and the shuffle becomes repeatable: the same phrase and the same list, in the same order, always produce the same bracket. That gives you a neat way to answer “was the draw rigged?” before anyone asks:
- At registration, announce the seed phrase you will use, for example
Riverside Open 2026-10-24. - At lunch, paste the eight breaking teams in tab order, the same order you publish on the results sheet.
- Press Build bracket with the seed filled in, and project it.
Anyone with a phone can paste the published list into the same tool with the same phrase and get the same bracket. The post on seeded shuffles explains why this works and its one trap: the result depends on list order, so the order you paste in must be the order you publish.
Once the bracket is built, Copy or Export CSV gives you the quarterfinal matches as text for the results board. The bracket tool lays out round one only; winners advance in the obvious way (match 1’s winner meets match 2’s winner, match 3’s meets match 4’s), and you fill those in by hand as ballots come back.
Sides in the knockout
Use the pairer once per knockout debate for the side call. Paste just the two team names and press the button: the result is a single match with a fair coin flip for PRO and CON. Many clubs instead give the side choice to the higher seed; if you do that, say so at registration. For a projected final, the pairer’s coin flip in front of the audience is a nice small ceremony.
A checklist for the morning of
- Topic generator: Clear history, choose Classic, tick No repeats until the list runs out. It stays ticked through a reload.
- Pairer: twelve team names saved in the list box (the list is kept in your browser between visits), plus a
BYEline ready if an odd number turns up. - A paper sheet with columns for each prelim round: opponent and side per team.
- Bracket: your seed phrase decided and announced; break size of eight or four.
- One projector, so every draw happens where the room can see it.
What the tools leave to you
All three tools are fair at the one thing they do, and none of them knows about your tournament. The topic generator doesn’t know which motions you consider too easy. The pairer doesn’t know who met whom in round one, or who has argued CON twice. The bracket tool doesn’t know your tab. The fairness of the day comes from the small rules you wrap around them: no-repeats on, rematches redrawn, sides balanced, and a seed phrase announced before the result exists. Write those four rules on the registration sheet, and most of the day’s “is this fair?” questions get answered before anyone asks them.