The LLWS bracket didn't read as a bracket: cards sat above games that
don't feed them, connectors joined the wrong pairs, and several games had
no line at all.
The stored data was correct — LLWS_ADVANCEMENT already matches the
official 2026 LLBWS bracket game for game. The renderer was the problem.
TreeColumns placed cards at `index * (height / roundSize)` and
ConnectorColumn assumed matches 2k and 2k+1 feed match k, which holds
only for an exact halving. The LLWS winners bracket is not one: two of
the four Opening Round games skip Winners Round 2 and go straight to the
semifinals, so those two got stranded in column one with nothing beside
them, and the halving branch drew confident, wrong connectors for the
rest.
Lay out from the graph instead. app/lib/bracket-layout.ts inverts a
template's advancement into "what fills each slot", then assigns columns
by depth from the group's final, orders each column by the parent's slot
order, and centres each card on its feeders. Counting back from the final
is what makes a printed bracket line up: a team entering late is drawn in
the column where it actually plays. This reproduces the official
International bracket exactly, and fixes Elimination Round 3, where the
official bracket prints the later game on top but match-number sort put
it below.
Because column is depth, every in-group edge spans exactly one gutter, so
connectors now draw for unplayed games too. Cards also take a fixed
height rather than stretching to fill their column, which is what made a
lone final tower over the rest.
Empty slots name their source — "Loser of Winners SF 1" rather than
"TBD". That is the only way to show the feeds crossing between the
winners and elimination brackets, which render as separate trees.
Also:
- Move the LLWS routing table to app/lib/llws-bracket.ts so the renderer
can import it without pulling the database context into the browser
bundle; models/playoff-match re-exports it.
- Page the mobile view one group at a time, matching desktop. A whole
double-elimination phase is a DAG, not a tree, so its columns would be
arbitrary.
- Add a clear-bracket admin action. Nothing else could rewrite a match's
participants, so a mis-seeded bracket had no repair path at all.
- Lift the PDF transcription into app/test/fixtures/llws-bracket.ts so the
routing and layout tests check against one copy of the official bracket.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01HnzbrCHoM8ESbtbDamaqFb
Review of the llws_20 bracket turned up two display bugs in the shared
ranking code, both triggered by the template setting loserFeedsInto on
every winners-bracket round.
findConsolationRound took the FIRST round with loserFeedsInto and
treated its target as a third-place game. That is sound for fifa_48,
whose only such round is the Semifinals, but llws_20 uses loserFeedsInto
to route losers into the elimination bracket — so "Elimination Round 1"
was being read as the consolation game. Its four matches were then
placed as exact positions inside the Opening Round tier, corrupting the
final rankings list. A consolation round now has to be terminal: its
winner plays no further game, which is precisely what lets its result
split two exact positions.
The rank walk also advanced by a round's match count on the assumption
that every match places its loser. That holds in single elimination and
must be kept for undecided rounds — four semifinalists occupy positions
1-4 whether or not the games have been played — but a winners-bracket
loss places nobody, since the loser drops into the elimination bracket
and is ranked by whatever knocks them out later. Those rounds consumed
positions they never filled, so a 20-team bracket ranked its last teams
T23. Rounds whose losers are placed later now consume nothing, leaving
LLWS at 1, T2, 3, 4, T5, T7, T9, T13, T17 for the full 20-team field.
Single-elimination templates are unaffected; afl_10's sub-8th ranks were
inflated the same way and are now correct too.
Also from review: the llws_20 participant labels were 21-24 characters
in an 80px fixed-width admin column and would have wrapped to three
lines across all 20 rows. Shortened them and widened the column.
Tests play a full 20-team tournament through the real advancement map
and assert the resulting rank labels.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EAxqBVzfmKJe6WQ6VF9guj
The Little League Baseball World Series runs two independent 10-team
double-elimination brackets — United States and International — each
producing a side champion, then a World Championship game and a
Consolation Third Place game between the side runners-up. 38 games in
all. No existing template could express it: every one is single
elimination, at most with a bolted-on third-place game.
Adds the llws_20 template plus dedicated generation and advancement,
following the same bespoke-routing pattern afl_10 and nba_20 use rather
than the generic ceil(matchNumber / 2) advancement.
The core of the change is loser routing. In the winners bracket a loss
is not an elimination — it drops the team into the elimination bracket
at a specific slot, including the deliberate cross-overs the official
bracket uses (Elimination Round 1 pairs L4/L6 and L2/L8; Elimination
Round 3 pairs each semifinal loser with the winner from the opposite
half). In the elimination bracket a loss is final. Matching the official
modified double-elimination format, there is no "if necessary" game: the
winners-bracket champion is eliminated if it loses the side
championship, dropping to the consolation game.
Rounds are shared across both sides, U.S. taking the low match numbers
and International the high ones, so the scoring config stays one entry
per stage. The existing phases/groups display machinery splits them back
apart into United States / International / Championship tabs.
Scoring lands on exactly 8 point-earning teams, which is the field size
when Elimination Round 4 begins: the two finals decide 1st–4th,
Elimination Final losers take 5th–6th, and Elimination Round 4 losers
7th–8th. 3rd and 4th are distinct because the consolation game is real,
and 5–8 splits into two two-team tiers so surviving Elimination Round 4
is worth more than losing it.
Also:
- Adds an optional nonScoringWinnerFloor to BracketRound. The engine
hardcoded a 5th-place floor for winners of non-scoring rounds feeding
a scoring one, which is wrong inside a losers bracket where a win can
guarantee only 7th. Opt-in, so no existing template changes behavior.
- Fixes TabbedBracketLayout's mobile path, which built its match map
unfiltered and so would have merged U.S. and International games into
one column. No-op for NCAA and NBA, whose groups already cover every
match in their phases.
- Rewrites the LLWS Monte Carlo simulator, which still modelled the
retired pool-play format (5 teams per pool, then a 4-team bracket per
side) and no longer described the tournament being scored. It now runs
the real 10-team double elimination and splits the 5–8 probabilities
into the correct tiers instead of one even four-way split. Legacy
"US:A"/"Intl:B" externalIds are still accepted, read as the side
alone, so seasons configured for the old format keep loading.
Tests replay all 38 games through the pure advancement resolver and
assert each one against the feed labels printed on the official bracket.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EAxqBVzfmKJe6WQ6VF9guj
Claude