Ready Up and Play

This is the moment everything else is scaffolding for. The bracket is drawn, your opponent is set, and it is time to actually play. Here is exactly how a match comes to life.

Your match has a window

Braket does not make you sit in a lobby waiting for an opponent to wander in. Instead, every match has a scheduled window: an opening time and a closing time between which the two sides are expected to play. You can see your windows on your own My matches page and on the tournament page under "your matches."

The window is a promise, not a countdown. It says: sometime between these two moments, you and your opponent should meet up and play your game. That flexibility is the whole point. You are not glued to a single instant; you have a block of time to coordinate within. But it is a real deadline too. You cannot ready up before the window opens, and you cannot ready up after it closes. Miss your window entirely and you are relying on an admin to sort out what happens, so treat the closing time seriously.

Pressing Ready

When your window is open, your match card shows a Ready button. Pressing it plants your flag: it tells Braket, and your opponent, that you are here and prepared to play right now.

Readying is how the two of you sync up without needing to be on a voice call. You press Ready, your opponent presses Ready, and when both of you are ready at the same time, the match begins. You do not have to press it at the exact same second; you just both have to be freshly ready within the same short span.

The readiness timer

Here is the detail that makes readying fair. Your Ready is only "fresh" for ten minutes. After that, if your opponent still has not shown up, your ready-up quietly expires and you will need to press Ready again when they appear.

Why does it expire? Because a Ready from three hours ago is not a real signal that you are still at your keyboard. The ten-minute freshness window means that when a match goes LIVE, it is because both players were genuinely present and ready within the same recent stretch of time, not because one of you clicked a button this morning and left. It protects you from being dragged into a "live" match against an opponent who readied and then wandered off. So if you readied up and nobody came, just re-arm it when they arrive; there is no penalty.

The match goes LIVE

The second both sides are freshly ready, the match flips to LIVE. This is the green light. Braket stamps the official start time and the match card changes to show it is in progress.

If you have push notifications enabled (page 10), this is where your phone buzzes: a "your match is LIVE" ping the instant it starts, wherever you are. That is deliberately the killer mobile moment. You can be on the couch when your opponent readies up, feel the buzz, and walk to your PC knowing the game is on.

Launching the game

Once your match is LIVE, you leave the website and go play. Open the game on Steam, get into a match against your opponent, and play it out for real. Braket does not run the game; it schedules and records it. The website's job is to get the two of you into the same LIVE state at the same time; your job from there is to win.

If the tournament allows spectators, a third player may be casting your match. You might see a caster attached to your match card and a link to their stream. Casting works off the match recording, not a seat inside your game session: the caster replays your match (after it ends, or trailing slightly behind live where the tournament supports near-live replay) and provides the commentary. It is normal, it means people care about your game, and it never interferes with it; the caster cannot be one of the players and nothing about your session changes.

After the whistle

When the game is decided, come back to Braket to record what happened. That is the next page: reporting the result, how agreement auto-confirms it, and what to do if you and your opponent see the outcome differently.

One last note for team players: any member of your roster can press Ready and take the side LIVE. You do not need the captain online. Whoever is ready to play can arm the match for the whole squad.