There was a recent tournament where 28.L.3 (“A player must not be given a full point bye more than once”) resulted in a player tied for second getting a final round full point bye.
Things get unusual in a four-round nine-player event, but does anybody think this rule should be modified if a final-round full-point bye is what guarantees money for a player? (I’m leaning towards “no modification”)
Going into the final round:
Player 1 at 3-0
Player 2 at 2-1 with a round four irrevocable half-point bye
Players 3 to 5 at 2-1
Players 6 to 8 at 1-2 and having already received full-point byes
Player 9 at 1-2 with no byes received and having to leave after round three
Players 2 and 9 cannot receive the final round bye because they won’t be there and players 6 to 8 have already received a full-point bye, leaving player 5 to get the bye.
During the final round (two monetary prizes at stake)
1 beat 3 (4-0) - gaining clear first place money
5 had the bye (3-1) - gaining clear second place money (the bye had clinched no worse than a tie for second)
4 drew 6 (2.5-1.5)
2 had a half point bye (2.5-1.5)
3 lost to 1 (2-2)
7 beat 8 (2-2)
6 drew 4 (1.5-2.5)
8 and 9 scored zero (1-3)
I absolutely hate it, but players 6-8 paid for four games. Bad enough to only get three, but as Mr. Price says, stuff happens. It would be unconscionable to give them only two.
The difference is, of course, that it is unknown what the player with the first round bye will do, but in Mr. Wiewel’s case the bye guaranteed prize money.
I agree. It’s unfortunate that a full point bye gave this player second place, but when you have to give full point byes in small sections weird things sometimes occur. Any cure you could come up with here would be worse than the disease.
I didn’t “hate” it, but I definitely would have preferred a good alternative. If there hadn’t been any other sections going on then I would have considered being a house-player TD playing my very first ever dual-rated game (not an optimal choice because I out-rated everybody in that top section be a couple hundred points or more, so I’d have to be paired with a 1-2 player to avoid skewing the prize-contenders results and thus have had a mis-match of around 450 rating points).
It’s likely that most such cases will have a prize fund low enough that people will generally just chalk it up to one of those things. The 1-2 vs 1-2 board played longest so the prizes could be paid out before the section finished.
Since all players were under 1800, and most were under 1600, and the time control was 40/60 d/5, if I were TD’ing I would have avoided all those early byes by any means possible. In this case that would probably mean cross-round pairings. (Middle-to-low ratings and fast time controls tend to make cross-round pairings feasible.)
You might end up with one bye in the last round, but you’d have a lot more choices as to which player to give it to.
Cross-round pairings don’t work too well in the G/40 section that has the longest running games. The bottom board in that section often finished either shortly before, or after, the the longest-running of the other games in the section.
There is always the last resort: having the (a) TD play to event the numbers and avoid the full point bye. A house player is a better choice, but not always available.
But not in advance. When the rules were set, we were blind as to the outcome, and hence the situation is fair. Giving the bye to that player was a logical result based on rules set in advance, not a choice at the moment when the prize distribution for that player was known.
With nine players and one of them registering for a final round half-point bye, it did not initially look like there was any need to worry about a final round bye. One player withdrawing after the third round, and that player being the only one in the lowest score group that hadn’t already had a bye, is what caused the final round bye to be problematic.
At scholastic tournaments we used to do cross-round pairings extensively, but then noticed that people taking half-point byes might sometimes cause a cross-round pairing every round (instead of every other round). As an example, we may have 55 players in round one resulted in 27 games plus one cross-round game (lowest rated 0-0 playing a round one game versus the quickest finishing low-rated 0-1 playing a round two game). Then a late arrival brings the number to 56 (or a withdrawal drops it to 54) and now you have an even number every round with one having already played that round and another thus needing a cross-round pairing that continues the problem into the next round.
Cross-section extra games usually have fewer problems than cross-round pairings, but only if there are players in the other sections, which wasn’t exactly the case for this tournament (the bottom two sections each had an extra player and cross-sectional casual games worked well for them).
The bye rules are what they are. The USCF considers them so important as there were 2 questions on my TD renewal quiz. As far as multiple byes; players hate them. So, you don’t want to drive newbies away. In fact, I’m sure we all
have jumped in and out of events to avoid them