Bye (sports)

A bye (English bye ) granted an athlete or a sports team progress to the next round to have started without the need to actually play.

Free tickets are required for a tournament after knockout system when the number of participants is not a power of two. Players or teams who get a bye, come to the next round without having to unregister a game or a fight. Usually the bye is really a draw, so determined randomly, but sometimes also granted on the strength of the participants.

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

But is usual a different approach: In the first round so many byes are awarded, that the number of participants in the second round is a power of two. This ensures that the subsequent course of the tournament must not be distorted by more byes. In 26 participants, 6 byes, so would forgive so that in the second round, 16 participants remain (10 winners from the first round of the 26 Teilnehmer/10 encounters and the 6 byes ). In the extreme case, if the number of participants exceeds a power of two to one, the result is that all the teams get a bye in the first round except two. This occurred more frequently in European Football Cup in the 1970s, such as the European Cup Winners' Cup 1977/78, when there were 33 participants. In these cases, where the majority of teams or participants do not have to compete in the first round, you do not usually speak of byes, but looking at the games of the first round as a separate preliminary or qualifying round and only referred to the next round as the first round.