8 News Now Best Pizza Bracket: How Voting Works & How to Win

What is the 8 News Now Best Pizza Bracket and who runs it?

The 8 News Now Best Pizza Bracket is a single-subject food competition staged by KLAS-TV 8 News Now, the Las Vegas newsroom whose coverage sits at 8newsnow.com. Rather than a wide multi-category readers' survey, the station built the event around a single question, which pizzeria deserves the crown, and registered it as a VotingBracket promotion on the Second Street platform. The ballot lives at lasvegasnow.secondstreetapp.com under the path 8-News-Now-Best-Pizza-Bracket, on the same Second Street presence the station uses for giveaways and photo features.

A Las Vegas pizzeria's blog covering the contest describes "a community driven competition that highlights the best pizzerias across Las Vegas," language that matches how the station framed the event to its audience. Because the format is a bracket rather than an open list, the field narrows in stages: a pizzeria advances by winning its round, and the matchups a supporter sees depend on how deep the contest has run.

When did the 2026 bracket run, and what does its dating look like?

Dates for the 2026 run are firm. The Second Street listing opens the promotion on March 10, 2026 and marks it closed as of April 16, 2026. Within that stretch the station printed a round-by-round schedule, with new rounds commencing at midnight on the specified dates, and the finals stage closing April 15. The schedule divided the contest into five qualifying rounds plus a finals, each with its own start and stop dates, so a supporter who arrived mid-bracket saw only the matchups then live.

The station issued that schedule in compressed shorthand rather than fully spelled-out dates, so the windows above reproduce it exactly as written. Read together with the listing's outer bounds, the pattern is clear: each qualifying round lasted only a few days, the finals overlapped the tail of the fifth round as printed, and everything sat inside the promotion's registered spring stretch.

Older history comes from the station's own coverage, which states that the Pizza Bracket was first launched in 2022, when participants voted to narrow down 64 contenders to a single champion, Dom DeMarco's. The Second Street listing itself shows a single dated instance of the promotion, the spring 2026 run. No years between those two markers are filled in anywhere in the material tied to the promotion, so anyone citing the bracket's history should lean on the station's own articles rather than assumptions about unbroken yearly runs.

This is the first confirmed edition; whether it returns next year is not yet published; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How does a supporter vote in the pizza bracket?

Taking part starts at the ballot's own address, lasvegasnow.secondstreetapp.com/8-News-Now-Best-Pizza-Bracket, which runs on Second Street alongside the station's sweepstakes and photo-gallery promotions. While a round is live, the page presents the pizza matchups for that stage, and a supporter picks the pizzeria to advance and submits the vote. Because each stage of the 2026 schedule began at midnight on its printed date, the matchups on screen changed overnight as rounds turned over.

The published material stops at the schedule. KLAS-TV 8 News Now has not published a category roster or a per-person voting rule alongside the bracket; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The listing likewise describes no sign-in requirement and no device restriction, and the promotion is registered as an unpaid voting format, so casting a vote is the entire task from a supporter's side.

Timing is the practical skill in a bracket like this. A vote landed during the wrong stretch does nothing for a pizzeria that has already been eliminated, so anyone backing a specific Las Vegas spot needs to know which round is live before clicking through. That is also why bracket campaigns are built around return visits; a single early vote cannot carry a pizzeria through five rounds.

How does the pizza bracket sit beside Nevada's other reader ballots?

Nevada's reader-vote tradition runs deep, and this bracket's neighbours show the range. There is Best of Las Vegas, the big multi-category survey, statewide Best of Nevada, Best of Northern Nevada from Reno News and Review, and the Best of Reno Community's Choice Awards. Further afield sit Best of Carson City from the Nevada Appeal and Best of Elko County from the Elko Daily, both built on the same readers-choose pattern.

Against that backdrop, the pizza bracket stands out for concentration. The newspaper surveys spread many categories across a long open window, while KLAS-TV 8 News Now compressed its contest into a few weeks with a single subject, pizza, and a knockout ladder. A pizzeria that thrives here is winning head-to-head rounds, not topping a wide field of businesses.

For a Las Vegas restaurant owner, the two formats complement each other rather than compete. The broad survey measures reputation across an entire market, while the bracket rewards mobilised, round-by-round support, which is why a short burst of fan energy inside a single window could decide a matchup in the 2026 run.

How can a pizzeria's fans make their votes count in this bracket?

Short rounds reshape how support has to be organised. Every 2026 stage opened at midnight and lasted only a handful of days, so a push that begins after a round closes helps nobody; fans of a Las Vegas pizzeria had to know the schedule before it mattered. The station's own approach pointed the same direction, pairing the voting launch with a call for readers to comment on its social media platforms, which is where its audience already gathers.

Outside help sits in a gap the station's published material does not close, so anyone arranging extra support should weigh the promotion's terms before spending, and keep in mind that no service, ours included, can guarantee a win. The tactics that transfer well to fan ballots of this shape are collected at how to get more votes online, and ordering specifics for award-style ballots sit at buy award votes.