Bye Weeks

How to schedule byes // odd number of teams

Updated over a week ago

Odd Number of Teams

If you have an odd number of teams and you want to give no more than one game per week, you'll want to follow this formula to create a standard round robin schedule with byes:

n teams playing n-1 games in n weeks

Example 1:
7 teams playing 6 games in 7 weeks

Example 2:
5 teams playing 8 games in 10 weeks

Example 3:
11 teams playing 10 games in 11 weeks
​ 

Alternative: even out odd divisions with a dummy team

If you need to play a set number of weeks that doesn't fit within this formula, you can also add a dummy team to make it an even number of teams. You can name it BYE or something like that. This allows you to simply set the number of games equal to your number of weeks. Of course, this may not give everyone the same number of games in the end, but it's likely the best you can do in this scenario.

Prevent Byes from taking up time slots

In PRO, you can additionally create a team constraint that blocks everything, so that byes remain unscheduled and don't take up any time slots.

Click 'Add Team Constraint', select the BYE team and 0:01 am in the from field, click 'save'. This will effectively block everything and leave those Bye games unscheduled.

In LITE, you can delete the team after your schedule has been generated. Click Teams, then click the delete button next to the extra team and then select Delete All (Games).

  


Even Number of Teams

If you have an even number of teams but – for whatever reason – you can't have all of them play each week, you'll need to increase your number of weeks or decrease your number of games accordingly. 

Example 4:
8 teams playing 6 games in 8 weeks
––> this will make 3 games each week, i.e. two teams will have a bye each week

The system will not show Byes explicitly in this scenario.

If you prefer, you can add bye "games" manually onto the schedule via the add a game button (towards the bottom of the controls on the schedule maker).

Simply select the actual team as the home team and leave the away team blank – the blank team will be interpreted by the system as Bye.

Optionally set the start to 23:59 on the date where you want the game to appear, which applies the Bye styling you see for system-generated Byes.

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