The Cup contest contains several knock-out rounds. The number of Cup rounds depends on the number of participants.

A player will be added randomly to a first Cup round slot as soon as a prediction was entered for the first Cup round. This task will be done by a program that runs every 30 minutes. Most of the Cup contests won't have exactly 16, 32, 64, 256, 512, 1024, ... participants, so some players will have a bye in the first Cup round.

Not all prediction rounds are part of the Cup contest. If, for example, the prediction game contains 10 prediction rounds and 200 players are participating, then the Cup contest will only need 8 Cup rounds (2^8 = 256 first round spots).

In rare cases there are less Cup round slots than players participating. The Six Nations tournament e.g. contains only five rounds which results in only 2^5=32 available slots. In that case the first round will be used as a qualification round and the best 16 players will qualify for the Cup contest. But most of the prediction games include more than 10 rounds which offers 2^10=1024 available slots.

The player with the better score will proceed to the next cup round. The winner of the final Cup round is the winner of the Cup contest.

In case of a draw the following tie-breaking criteria will be applied:

• the result from the previous cup round
• all other cup rounds (backwards step-by-step)
• the ranking from the Classic contest
• the ranking from the Cluster contests with the fewest prediction games

In some prediction games (mostly football) the Cup contest will be staged twice. If a Cup round contains one or more postponed matches, the according Cup round will be shifted to the next round.