How to Seed a Table Tennis Tournament
Good seeding keeps the strongest players apart until the later rounds. Bad seeding produces a first-round match between the two best players and an unfair draw for everyone else.
What seeding does
You rank the strongest players and place them in fixed positions so they cannot meet before a planned round. The top two seeds can only meet in the final, seeds three and four can only meet one of the top two in the semifinals, and so on. Without seeds, the best two players have a real chance of meeting in round one.
Rankings come from ratings if you have them, recent results, or the director’s judgment. Document how you ranked, because players will ask.
Where the seeds go
The standard method puts seed 1 in the top position and seed 2 in the bottom position, so they sit at opposite ends. Seeds 3 and 4 go in the other quarters, again in opposite halves from each other, and the rest follow a pattern that makes each first-round match seed n versus seed (draw size + 1 − n). In an 8-player draw the order from top to bottom is 1, 8, 4, 5, 2, 7, 3, 6.
Skip the arithmetic: the seeding spreadsheet ranks your entries, makes snake-seeded groups and fills the bracket slots, with byes for the top seeds.
The seeding positions chart gives the order for any draw size from 4 to 128.
How many players to seed
A common rule is to seed up to a quarter of the draw size: 2 seeds in a draw of 4 to 8, 4 in a draw of 16, 8 in a draw of 32 and 16 in a draw of 64. Seeding more players than you can rank confidently does more harm than good. If you have no ratings, seed only the players you know to be strongest and draw the rest.
Byes
If the player count is not a power of two, the draw is rounded up and the gaps are byes, where the player advances without playing. Byes go to the top seeds, in order: seed 1 gets the first bye, seed 2 the second, and so on. For example, 56 players in a 64 draw have 8 byes for seeds 1 to 8, which means 24 first-round matches and 32 players in round two.
If byes are drawn at random, a weak unseeded player can get a free pass while a top seed plays a long first match. Always assign byes to the highest seeds.
Placing the unseeded players
Draw the unseeded players at random into the remaining positions. To make the draw fair in practice, then adjust for:
- Same club or team: keep teammates apart in round one when you can, by swapping the lower-placed player with someone else in the same draw.
- Same group: after a group stage, never let two players from the same group meet in the first knockout round.
Keep the swaps minimal and document them. Do the draw in public, or at least post the method.
Seeding groups
For round-robin groups, use a snake. Rank all players, put seed 1 in group A, seed 2 in group B, and so on to the last group. Then reverse the order for the next row, so the last group gets the next seed and group A gets the weakest of that row. Each group ends up with a similar spread of strength.
The free tournament software does all of this for you: group snake seeding, seeded brackets with byes for top seeds, and automatic separation of players from the same group or club in the first round.