What is Netbrawl.com?

It's a fun site where you can get or give input on any subject you want through the means of a tournament bracket with winners and losers. Aside from fun brackets like best song or worst movie, the site can also be used as a consumer guide. You can pit fashion apparel against each other or electronics, household appliances, whole companies or brands, basically anything you can think of, even ideas and philosophies.

How does it work?

The brackets on Netbrawl.com work just like the “March Madness” NCAA basketball tournament or in most tennis tournaments except the winners are determined by the voters. That would be you. Each bracket contains Contenders vying to reach and win the finals. Brackets can start with 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, or 64 Contenders. You can use our Search field found at the top of every page or the Advanced Search Page to find brackets you're interested in, and if you can't find that bracket, you can just make your own!

If you want to make sure people know about your bracket or one you’re interested in, use the “Send to Friends” button on the Bracket-Voting Pages. The linking URL addresses should look like this:
http://netbrawl.com/bracket.php?bracketid=120

and never like this:
http://netbrawl.com/bracket.php?bracketid=120

In addition to each bracket getting its own page, each match-up in the bracket also gets its own page. To see a Match-up Page, click on a contender’s name in that match-up. On the Match-up Pages, you can see pictures or videos associated with the contenders if there are any. You can also make comments about the match-up to discuss the pros and cons of each Contender. What fun are brackets if you don't get to argue over them? If you want to make general comments about the bracket as a whole, you should post those on the page of the first match-up in the bracket.

Why brackets instead of polls?

Brackets are a lot more fun. Polls don’t always reveal the strengths and weaknesses of the participants in the way direct head-to-head match-ups do when considered. And the final winner of a bracket is forced through a gauntlet of other winners through each round. Some brackets can turn into epic struggles.

How do I make a bracket?

Click on the "Create a Bracket" link found near the top of every page, select the Primary and Secondary Categories that best fit your bracket, enter Key Words to help others find your bracket in searches, decide how many days you want to elapse between rounds, and then type in your Contenders. Uploads of up to 100 kb for pictures or URL links for videos are available for you to insert accompanying media to enhance your Match-ups, which will attract voters. Each round of the bracket will end after the allotted time you designated and the Contender with the most votes will move on to the next round automatically until there is a winner.

Note: Contender names are automatically included in searches and so do not need to be added as key words. Rounds always end at midnight Central Standard Time, but the first round will always last a minimum of 24 hours. So a first round designated to last 1 day will actually last from the time it was created to midnight + one whole other day. So a bracket created 10 minutes before midnight set to 1-day rounds will have a round 1 that lasts 24 hours and 10 minutes.

What can I do on My Account page?

Here you can add an avatar picture (limit 100 kb) that will appear with your comments on Match-up Pages. You can also change your password, see the active brackets (those still getting votes) and closed brackets (those that have a winner) that you have made yourself, track active brackets that you’ve voted in, and check brackets or users you’ve marked as favorites. You can delete your favorites but not your brackets. Clicking on another user’s name takes you to their Profile Page where you can see the active and closed brackets that they’ve made as well as their favorite brackets by other users and their own favorite users.

What are some strategies in making brackets?

The most common method for sorting Contenders in brackets is to match up the highest ranked or most likely to win Contenders against the lowest ranked or least likely to win Contenders in the first round like so:

#1 vs. #8
#4 vs. #5
#2 vs. #7
#3 vs. #6

The benefit of this method is that you're more likely to have an exciting final couple of rounds, but you're more likely to have a more predictable, less exciting first couple of rounds. On the other hand, upsets are always possible.

Another more aesthetic way of creating a bracket is matching up the Contenders in the first round that make some kind of organizational sense. Let's say you're making a bracket for "Best Movie." Maybe you’ll want to put all the comedies together in one part of the bracket, all the dramas in another part, all the action films in another part, etc. For example:

The Dark Knight vs. The Matrix (action)
Seven Samurai vs. The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (adventure)
Dr. Strangelove vs. Some Like It Hot (comedy)
City Lights vs. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (comedy)
The Godfather vs. Goodfellas (drama/crime)
Rear Window vs. Citizen Kane (drama)
Apocalypse Now vs. Full Metal Jacket (war)
The Bridge on the River Kwai vs. Saving Private Ryan (war)

Or using another organizational scheme, you could match up Contenders by age:

City Lights (1931) vs. Citizen Kane (1941)
Seven Samurai (1954) vs. Rear Window (1953)
The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) vs. Some Like It Hot (1959)
Dr. Strangelove (1964) vs. The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (1966)
The Godfather (1972) vs. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
Apocalypse Now (1979) vs. Full Metal Jacket (1987)
Goodfellas (1990) vs. Saving Private Ryan (1998)
The Matrix (1999) vs. The Dark Knight (2008)

The art of bracketology is to find relationships among Contenders and match them up in ways that make some kind of logical sense. That tends to make voting in such brackets more fun as each individual match-up makes sense and so has something at stake.

What happens in case of ties?

The winner is determined by the user who made the bracket in the sense that whichever Contender is listed higher when the user created the bracket wins in case of a tie. For example, Contender 1 will beat any other Contender in the case of a tie. Contender 5 will beat Contender 13 in case of a tie.

What's the purpose of "open-ended" brackets?

Open-ended brackets always stay active and thus never advance past the first round. The results of bracket voting are always going to be time dependent to some degree. Evaluating how good a president George W. Bush has been would likely give very divergent results between a bracket made in 2002 and one made in 2008. Evaluating how good a movie Titanic is could show very divergent results between a bracket made in 1998 and one made today. Open-ended brackets allow the user to minimize the effect of a specific time period on voting.

How can I get a new Primary Category or Secondary Category added?

If we get enough requests for a Category we have failed to list, we will add said Category.

What is the "Top 20 Bracket Makers" about?

The "Top 20 Bracket Makers" displays the twenty users who have created the brackets which have received the most votes in the past seven days. This can be achieved through making ten brackets that together garnered 5,000 votes over the past week or through making one bracket that garnered 5,000 votes over the week. Note that when the bracket was made is not relevant to the scoring, only when the votes were cast. Getting on to this list by making the most popular brackets says something special about your bracket-making abilities. The list is refreshed once a day.

Are there any restrictions to what are allowed in Brackets?

Yes. We would like to maximize freedom of expression, but we cannot condone brackets clearly made to attack people who are not public personalities. Also brackets that clearly slander any one will be removed.

Because Netbrawl.com is a site that caters to people of all ages, brackets or comments that contain profanity, obscenity, or lascivious adult content will be removed. This applies to pictures or videos linked in brackets as well.

We cannot always monitor every bracket and forum post, so please report content you find objectionable to us. We reserve the right to remove any hateful, bigoted, or uncivil comments. Thank you.