An eliminator is simple to explain and unpleasant to administer — the field halves every game and somebody has to work out who is still alive while bowlers are standing at the desk asking.
An eliminator — sometimes called a cut-the-field pot — is a side pot in which the lowest-scoring part of the field is eliminated after every game. Survive every cut and you are still in at the end, splitting the pot with however few bowlers are left.
Unlike a bracket, nobody is drawn against anybody. You are competing against the whole field at once, and the only question each game is whether your score was in the surviving half.
The lowest-scoring half of the field is eliminated each game. The program applies the cut as scores are entered and keeps the alive list current, so the answer to “am I still in?” is on a printed sheet rather than in somebody's memory.
Halving is aggressive, and operators are sometimes surprised by how quickly a large field collapses:
| Entries | After game 1 | After game 2 | After game 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 16 | 8 | 4 | 2 |
| 32 | 16 | 8 | 4 |
| 64 | 32 | 16 | 8 |
| 100 | 50 | 25 | 12 or 13 |
The 100-entry row is the realistic one, and it shows the problem: the field will not divide evenly, so at some point you have to decide whether the cut rounds in the bowlers' favour or against it. Decide that in advance, publish it, and the arithmetic stops being contentious.
You decide how many positions pay, based on entries. The program works the payouts from the pool that was actually collected and shows them before you commit — there is no fixed structure imposed on your event.
An eliminator produces more disputes per dollar than almost any other side format, and nearly all of them come from the same place: two bowlers sitting on the cut line, or several survivors finishing level. The software applies the cut and tracks who is alive; what it cannot do is decide, halfway through, how your house wants a tie handled.
Post that rule with your entry information before the first ball — how a tie on the cut line is resolved, and how a pot is divided if more than one bowler survives. Written down in advance it is a footnote. Decided at midnight with people waiting, it is an argument.
Printing the alive list after every game is the single practice that makes an eliminator pleasant to run. It converts a continuous queue of bowlers asking whether they survived into a sheet on the wall.
This runs inside the same session as your brackets and side pots. You are not exporting to a second tool or keeping a separate sheet — entries, scores, counts and payouts all live in one place, and the printed reports come out of the same program, so the drawer reconciles against one set of session totals rather than several.
The free demo is the complete program, not a limited trial — every feature unlocked, capped at 16 bowlers per session so you can see exactly how it works.
Download the free demo See pricingA side pot where the lowest-scoring part of the field — most commonly the bottom half — is cut after every game. Survivors split the pot at the end. Nobody is drawn against anybody; you are competing against the whole field at once.
That depends on the entries and how many games are cut. Halving a 64-entry field over three games leaves eight survivors; halving a 32-entry field leaves four. The operator sets how many positions ultimately pay.
You have to decide whether the cut rounds in the bowlers' favour or against it, and publish that before entries are sold. A 25-bowler field cut in half is either 12 or 13 survivors, and deciding which on the night is how arguments start.
With a rule posted before the first ball. Ties on the cut line are the most common eliminator dispute there is, because the tie decides whether somebody is still in the pot at all. Publish that rule, the rounding rule and the multiple-survivor split rule together.
No. Like other side-action formats it runs on games already being bowled. What it adds is administrative work: a cut to compute and an alive list to publish after every game.