This is a hypothetical – suppose a player in a normal swiss tournament requests a half-point bye for round 1 in advance. Upon doing the first round pairings, it turns out there are an odd number of players (including the one who requested the bye), and that person also happens to be the lowest rated. So they would have received a full point bye in the first round under normal circumstances, and other players will get full point byes in later rounds.
Should that odd player be given a full point bye in round one to get parity with other full-point bye players later in the tournament, or only get the half point since it was comitted in advance?
Grant, that is a brilliant concept that maintains fairness and has the added bonus of making it more likely that ties either will not exist, or can be broken.
Mike, you raised a very good point. However, you overlooked that the average of the black and white byes should still be .75. Thus the .25 bonus for the bye should be calculated as (white bye + black bye) / 2 = .25 which becomes 2/3 black bye + black bye = .5 which means the black bye bonus is .3 and the white bye bonus is .2.
So we have the following:
a requested 1/2 point bye for for a player that would not otherwise get a bye = .5
a requested 1/2 point bye for for a player that would normally get a bye, and is treated as having been paired as white (the lowest rated player actually paired received black) = .7
a requested 1/2 point bye for for a player that would normally get a bye, and is treated as having been paired as black (the lowest rated player actually paired received white) = .8
To maintain color equity, this will, of course, require the player with the .7 or .8 bye to be treated as having a round one pairing with the color that was assigned for the bye.
Mike, will you write up the modification requirements for the major pairing program companies?
