bye

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A walkover ( english bye ) granted an athlete or a sports team a place in the next round to have begun without the necessary to actually play.

Byes are required in a knockout tournament if the number of participants is not a power of two . The players or teams who are awarded a bye advance to the next round without having to play a game or fight. Most of the time, the bye is actually drawn, i.e. randomly determined, but sometimes also allocated according to the strength of the participants.

There are two different ways to use byes. One bye can be given in every round in which there is an odd number of participants, so that there can be a maximum of one bye in each round. In extreme cases, this means that a team or a participant still gets a bye in the semifinals if there are only three participants in the tournament.

However, a different approach is usual: In the first round, so many byes are awarded that the number of participants in the second round is a power of two. This guarantees that the later course of the tournament does not have to be distorted by further byes. If there were 26 participants, 6 byes would be awarded so that 16 participants would remain in the second round (10 winners from the first round of 26 participants / 10 matches and the 6 byes). In the extreme case, when the number of participants exceeds a power of two by one, this means that all teams except two get a bye in the first round. This occurred more frequently in the European Football Cup of the 1970s, for example in the 1977/78 European Cup Winners' Cup , when there were 33 participants. In these cases, where the majority of the teams or participants do not have to compete in the first round, one does not normally speak of byes, but considers the games of the first round as a separate preliminary or qualifying round and only designates the next round as the first round.

For chess tournaments that are played according to the Swiss system , a bye is required if the number of participants is uneven. The bye will then be awarded to one of the players with the lowest number of points. The player remains free of play in the round concerned and receives one point - as if he had won the game. No player may receive more than one bye in the tournament.

See also