English Chess Forum

I am playing in a seven round tournament that allows a player to take upto two half point byes (except in the final round). In the first round an odd number of players were available to play, so the lowest rated was awarded a full point bye. This caused some mild moaning from the affected player, as they were taking a voluntary bye that afternoon, so would not have any tournament games on the first day (and despite being on paper the weakest player would start the second day on 1.5/2).
Consequently in subsequent rounds where there have been an odd number of players, the arbiter has manually adjusted the computer-generated pairings to ensure that nobody who has taken, or requested a future, half point bye is given the full point involuntary bye.
Is it better to ignore requested byes in allocating involuntary byes or should they only be given to those who are not otherwise taking byes?

Nigel White wrote: ↑

Sun Apr 20, 2025 7:40 am

I am playing in a seven round tournament that allows a player to take upto two half point byes (except in the final round). In the first round an odd number of players were available to play, so the lowest rated was awarded a full point bye.

Always awarding the bye to the player last in the seedings has its own disadvantages because the same player may be bottom of the seedings for several tournaments. That's either because they enter events for which they are likely to be the lowest rated, or because their name is last in the alphabetic list of unrated entrants. British arbiters used to use the rule of giving the bye to the mid ranked player, but that can have the disadvantage of awarding the full point to a tournament winner.

I'm aware that FIDE ware looking into what they termed "Pairing Allocated Byes". I don't know what final conclusions they reached, if any, but I have noticed that in team events the bye is now a half point one.

I believe the FIDE pairing rules do a "look back" and don't give a full point bye to a player who has already had a half point bye. It doesn't seem they do a "look ahead" and disqualify a player from receiving a full point bye if they've already had a half point one. It would seem a sensible measure to enact but would only work for automatic pairings if the arbiter or organiser had the future byes correctly recorded.

For what it's worth here's an account of a previous row on this issue, although this was a look back rather than a look forward.

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