Odd Man Out: Five Ways To Handle Byes At Tournaments

Good morning gamers,

Over the past ten years, we've thrown a lot of tournaments here at TMAT - and as the Tournament Organizer (TO) for most of them, I can say running a tournament for your friends is a really great experience (albeit hectic and stressful sometimes). One of the most common problems that TOs face across the world is what to do when you have an odd number of players/teams. Naturally, people come to a tournament and want to play - no one wants to sit out for 1-2 hours watching other people play. 

To answer this age-old question, different tournament organizers have taken a variety of approaches to "solve" the problem, but each has their own draw-backs. So, in today's post, we will be exploring all the options I've heard of (and tried out) for handling byes and talking through their advantages and their disadvantages. Let's get right to it.

#1: The Lowest Player Out

The Matched Play Guide was a great addition to the MESBG canon, providing TOs with six additional scenarios to throw at our players as well as ways to group scenarios into common types and several doubles scenarios (previously TOs were on their own for doubles events). It also proposed a system of "lowest player out" to handle byes. Here's how it works:

1. During the first round of the game, a random player is selected to have a bye;
2. During the second round, whichever player was ranked the lowest gets the bye and the player who had the bye during the first round plays at the "bottom table" against the player with the second lowest ranking.
   
3. During the third round, the player who cumulatively had the lowest score during the first two rounds sits out while the guy who sat out during the second round plays against the second lowest ranked player after two rounds.
4. You get the idea for future rounds.

The advantage of this system is that you only get a bye if you a) were randomly chosen at the start of the event, or b) are doing the worst at the event. This is better than "hey, you X random players all have to sit out one game," but it does have a few very significant drawbacks. First and foremost, while some players who do poorly could learn from the "good" players by watching their games, it can be a barrier to new players enjoying their first tournament experience (who wants to be singled out as the worst players for a round?).

The second big issue with this system is that whoever randomly gets the bye on the first round needs to do well on the second round or he could face sitting out during the third round! TOs need to decide how many points are awarded to the player who "has the bye" - and if that number is 0, that's going to be a really hard barrier to overcome. If a really good player starts with the bye, he might be able to win the second round and press on towards the top, but if the player with the bye gets 0 points for it, he's basically out of the running for winning the event unless he gets smashing victories in all his other games and the other players don't.

Third, this system only works if you have a lot of players and play for a lot of rounds. In a one-day, 6-8 player, 3-4 game tournament, sitting out for a round and having to start from the bottom is going to be a struggle to claw your way up. At a recent THRO tournament, my son Gorgoroth got major losses in his first two games of a four-game tournament and was playing at the bottom table on round 3. After a major victory he was ranked sixth and ended up placing fourth after another big win. While we didn't have a bye in play, anyone who starts at the bottom table half way through the tournament is going to struggle - and as the number of players increases, it makes it much harder to actually do well with this system.

That said, if you need to propose a system for running a tournament, this seems like a pretty valid way to do it. It does have some issues, which is why some TOs (including myself when I started out TOing) would probably opt for . . .

#2: The Bye-Buster

I'm going to go out and say that this is still one of my favorite ways to handle byes for a tournament - but I'm not using it anymore. In this system, a player is designated as "the bye buster" and he will only play if there is an even number of players. When I started running tournaments, I designated myself as the bye buster since . . . I was running the tournament. The advantage of this system is that everyone who comes to your event gets to play - no matter how well they do and no matter how poorly they do, they're in the driver's seat every game. This makes it fun for them and allows them to have a good time.

If, however, you have small children at home and can only get away a few times a year to events that you are running . . . it means you never play at tournaments. And for a long time, I got very excited about running a tournament and preparing for it only to have someone cancel at the last minute and having to sit on the sidelines. This is life being life doing life stuff - it happens. I've never blamed players for not allowing me to play at events that I throw - and I've found ways to make it through the day and find things to like about the event. But if you like playing in tournaments, testing your skill against others, and if you like list building/testing as much as I do, you will probably lose a lot of your love for the game if you aren't able to play. So, while I like this system a lot, I would only recommend it to TOs (and I would ALWAYS suggest that the TO be the bye buster) who are able to go to other people's events (or if they have a friend who is like, "I will only play if you absolutely need me" - buy that friend a drink and keep him/her forever).

If you want everyone to play (including yourself), you could opt for a very common approach known as . . .

#3: The Automatic Result

This one is straight-forward and simple: byes are assigned at random and whoever gets the bye gets X points. Simple, right? This was the first method we used at TMAT and it seems to be a popular way for lazy TOs (I don't mean that derogatorily - there's a lot that goes into planning a tournament and this simplifies part of it) to handle the difficult and complicated problem of odd numbers of players.

The problem is determining how many points to award for a bye. Consider the following seven players in a three-game tournament (names not generated at random, hat-tip to the Unexpected Podcast Team):

• Mik's Mordor-Haradrim alliance gets 2 Major Victories and a bye;
• Matt's Iron-Hills-Chariot list gets 1 Major Victory and 2 Minor Victories;
• Evan's Mordor-Spider-Queen convenient alliance gets 1 Major Victory and 2 Minor Losses (to Devin and Rob);
• Devin's Mahud list gets 1 Minor Victory, 1 Minor Loss (to Matt), and a bye;
• Tim's Morgul-Stalker-spam gets 1 Minor Victory, 1 Minor Loss (to Matt), and 1 Major Loss (to Mik);
• Rob's Dale-Legion list gets 1 Minor Victory, 1 Minor Loss (to Tim), and 1 Major Loss (to Matt); and
• Rainier's Easterlings (sorry Rainier and Easterling fans everywhere, someone had to go on the bottom - #JusticeForRainier #ShadowInTheEast #NewHeroesAreAce) gets 2 Major Losses (to Mik and Evan) and a bye.

Okay people - let's assume that we're awarding the following tournament points for each victory/loss/draw:

• Major Victory: 10pts
• Minor Victory: 8pts
• Draw: 6pts
• Minor Loss: 4pts
• Major Loss: 2pts

The scores would be tallied as follows (with the byes noted by the Xs):

• Matt: 26
• Mik: 20 + X
• Evan: 18
• Devin: 12 + X
• Tim: 14
• Rob: 14
• Rainier: 4 + X

How many points would you give each player for the bye game? The way I see it there are a few ways you can hand out points to players:

• Everyone with a bye gets a draw (6pts) - if this is the case, Mik/Matt tie for first, Devin/Evan tie for third, and poor Rainier keeps last place (again, I'm sorry). Tie breaks would be used to get an actual ranking - I didn't put the work into that here.
• Everyone with a bye gets a Minor Victory (8pts) - if this is the case, Mik beats out Matt despite only playing two games to Matt's three, Devin passes Evan despite getting a minor victory to Evan's major victory, and Rainier . . . keeps last place (but just barely).
• Everyone with a bye gets something unconventional but still a "win" (let's say 7pts) - if this is the case, the same results from the previous bullet point apply, but "it's closer."

Now you might say, "Well, that's how luck of the draw goes" - but it does bear repeating that four of the players had to actually play three games while the other three players coasted in with a "win" (or maybe a draw) in their pockets. Is that fair? Is luck of the draw really the best way to determine who "wins" a tournament? Well, if you don't want that, let me propose . . .

#4: The Averaged/Weighted Results

This requires a little bit of math, but is pretty simple as well: randomly assign the byes and average the scores that a player gets in their other games. If we took the previous rankings, Mik would get the average of his 2 Major Victories and get 10pts for his bye, while poor Rainier (I feel so bad about this, man) gets 2pts for his bye because he got 2 Major Losses. Devin averages a Minor Win and Minor Loss to get a Draw (6pts) for his bye, which would tie with Evan for 3rd (tie-breaks then applied - probably averaging VPs from the other games), while Mik secures the victory over Matt and Rainier is left clear in the dust.

This is might be a "better" system than the previous one because your scores are generated by how you do in the tournament - and if you have a 6-game tournament and you're averaging five scores, this system is probably the best one there is. But in a one-day, three-game tournament, you're averaging two numbers in games that were probably randomly assigned - and if you randomly got the two lists that you're going to struggle against in the two scenarios you don't like, you could feel like you have no agency in how well you do at the tournament. It might be "more fair," but it doesn't feel good.

At our most recent Grand Tournament here at TMAT, we had a variant of this that we tried where the score for the bye round was the average of all the bye player games - thereby simulating "how good" the "bye player" was. In our example above, we'd have six data points (20pts from Mik, 4pts from Rainier, and 12pts from Devin). In this case, it would average out to 6pts/player ((20+4+12)/6) and Mik and Devin would hate Rainier for the rest of the day for screwing things up. :) But you get the idea, hopefully: yes, you might randomly get a worse score than you could by playing (and averaging a draw might be okay with Devin's record, but it's low for Mik's and high for Rainier's), but it might be better from an averaging perspective than averaging two data points.

My good mate Red Jacket mentioned after the event that it would be good to do a weighted average if you're doing a cumulative bye score (half your score being generated by your performance, half your score being generated by the other bye players), which would give Mik a bye score of ((20/2)/2 + ((4+12)/4)/2) = 7pts, Devin a bye score of ((12/2)/2 + ((20+4)/4)/2) = 6pts, and poor Rainier a bye score of ((4/2)/2 + ((20+12)/4)/2) = 5pts. Not that much of a change from the 6ps each, but a change none the less - and a feeling of reward for "being the bye guy who pulled his weight."

We learn from Norton Juster's work The Phantom Tollbooth that "Average's aren't real - they're imaginary." Averaging a score isn't a great way to do it to be honest, which brings us to what I think is the best system for handling byes . . . and requires a LOT of commitment before the tournament to pull off . . .

#5: Automated AI System

Ah, I was so pleased when I came up with this one - and to my knowledge no one else has ever done it. This system is the simplest in the books from a TOs perspective: everyone plays against a pre-determined "automated player" (controlled by the TO or an appointed representative) before the tournament and logs what the VP score is for the match. The scenarios for each round would need to be known in advance (not randomized the day-of) and you'd need to have great communication with everyone before the event so they knew to get games in prior to coming. Whoever gets a bye for each round gets their score from the game they've already played.

Unlike all the other bye systems, this is "the most fair," since . . . you're playing against an opponent (just not at the tournament). Yes, the person controlling the list may change (and the skill of players may be slightly different), but you'd at least get to play. You'd get to roll the dice, you'd get to kill things, you'd get to forge and decide your own destiny (instead of leaving it to averages or weight scores). But this system has one MAJOR drawback: you have to get everyone to play their games beforehand. If you have friends who are busy and can't come to hang out and play 3+ 1-2hr games before a big event with an army that's "locked in", what score do they get? Do they get a Major Loss for "no-showing" just because they're busy? Do they get a "draw" when other players who actually showed up to play these games may have gotten losses (see the commentary above on how picking arbitrary values for scores comes with its own baggage)? Or do you make it so that you can't get lower than <insert your arbitrary points awarded here> no matter how badly you scored in the game?

We didn't end up needing this system when we did it, so I don't have any answers - but we did play a few of the games (me and Centaur played all three of ours, Rythbyrt played one, no one else showed up) and it was great to have the pressure of a tournament game outside of a tournament, but this system really only works if everyone is committed to playing the games ahead of time.

BONUS #6: Do Nothing

We once had a tournament where I dropped the points limit so low (150pts, no heroes required, only 5-40pt heroes allowed) that we played 7 rounds with 7 players. The result? Everyone had a bye. What score did we award for the byes? 0. Why? Because everyone got one. Everyone will sit out for a time and watch everyone else duke it out - easy, right?

Fair and simple, this system works really well if you intend to keep the points levels low, the timers short, the scenarios straight forward, and the number of players tight. It's not really a good solution for most tournaments, but it does work under the right conditions.

Conclusion

If you are a TO (or just a tournament regular), I'd love to hear what your experience with byes has been - drop them in the comments below and let us know! If you found this useful and are thinking about running tournaments, let us know that too - we're full of advice here for how to do that. I'd also recommend you check out the Unexpected Podcast Team's work on YouTube (and other podcast venues) - they have a lot of advice for running tournaments (specifically for handling scenarios and "broken" lists). Until next time, happy hobbying!