The dead club doubles its staff, and the draw is made where you can see it

Six new opponent families (head coach, stringer, strawberry seller, chair
umpire, spectator, roller man) through the famroll/zsheet route, placed by
hierarchy into an 18-rung ladder; the champion steps up behind them.

THE DRAW: picking the tournament now rolls its own bracket in front of you —
only the final was ever settled — and what lands is what walks on.

Netplay, off Oliver's cellular report: the mid-flight early-decide was missing
its !G.net gate, so the striker judged its own outbound flight and the two
scoreboards drifted a point apart into a court nobody could serve on. The
host's court now rides the room, its scoreboard rides the pretoss stream, and
a called ball rolls to its own halt instead of freezing where the call caught it.

Plus the night court, and somebody in the stand is taking pictures.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

src/beats.js

@@ -342,14 +342,17 @@ export function watchdog(dt) {
 // the match mode ends. Regicide is inherited for free: smashing the ball into the body still wounds
 // it, and killing it outright wins the game early (killZombie fires resolveInterlude('P'), which
 // lands in matchGameWon via the empty-court check).
-export function startMatch(cup = false) {
+// `draw` is the bracket screen's settled rungs, one per CUP_ROUNDS entry (main.buildBracket). It is
+// optional and null means "roll each round as it comes", which is what the mode did before the
+// screen existed and is still what the #cup back door gets.
+export function startMatch(cup = false, draw = null) {
   if (G.interlude || G.horde || G.bossFight || G.drill || G.match || G.bench || G.net) return false;
   G.match = { opp: 1, ending: false };
   // THE TOURNAMENT rides the whole match machinery and differs in exactly three places: who walks
   // on (a rung DRAWN from the round's band — cupDraw sets d.opp, so every ladder dial downstream
   // scales off the drawn rung untouched), how deep the body's pool is (matchOpponent multiplies
   // by the round's `need`), and where a won game goes (cupGameWon). See config.CUP_ROUNDS.
-  if (cup) { G.match.cup = { round: 0, g: 0 }; cupDraw(); }
+  if (cup) { G.match.cup = { round: 0, g: 0, draw: draw || null }; cupDraw(); }
   G.matchFall = null;
   G.hp = G.hpMax = TUNE.matchPlayerHp;  // a real match is longer than four mistakes — the gore
                                         // mode's 4 was "too weak" here, felt not calculated
@@ -380,9 +383,15 @@ export function startMatch(cup = false) {
 
 // The round's rung, drawn from its band. d.opp carries it so matchFoe, the ladder speed dials and
 // the felled arithmetic all read the drawn rung with no cup-awareness of their own.
+// A DRAW MADE ON SCREEN IS THE DRAW THAT IS PLAYED. When the bracket screen settled the rungs they
+// arrive here as cup.draw and this simply reads them off — rolling again would mean the faces the
+// player watched land had nothing to do with what walks on, which is worse than showing nothing.
+// Guarded on the band all the same: a saved or hand-passed draw that names a rung this round does
+// not contain falls back to an honest roll rather than dealing the champion in round one.
 function cupDraw() {
   const cup = G.match.cup, R = CUP_ROUNDS[cup.round];
-  cup.rung = R.band[Math.floor(Math.random() * R.band.length)];
+  const drawn = cup.draw && cup.draw[cup.round];
+  cup.rung = R.band.includes(drawn) ? drawn : R.band[Math.floor(Math.random() * R.band.length)];
   G.match.opp = cup.rung;
 }