If the players are late or if they have missed the first few rounds of the tournament for some reasons, they can still join the tournament in the middle and play the remaining rounds.
NOTE: This only applies to Swiss format tournaments and ONLY the students you have invited when creating the tournament (the ‘Participants’ section) can join. Students who were NOT selected when creating the tournament CANNOT join.
How does it work?
After you create a tournament, you will see the following pop-up:
As explained there, your students can do the following:
- Late Join – Join the tournament in the middle (even if they miss the first round or first few rounds)
- Exit – If they have to leave the tournament in the middle for some reasons, they can do that too. This way, they won’t be included in the pairings and you will have a smooth tournament
- Rejoin – Even after they exit in the middle, your students can rejoin the tournament, if they want to, before the tournament completion
Points System – how are the Late Joiners and Exiters scored?
The players who join late and exit the tournament in the middle are scored in the following manner:
- Half Bye – The ‘Half Bye’ means that the player gets 0.5 points for the first round as he/she has joined late and has missed the first round.
- Zero Bye – The ‘Zero Bye’ means that the player gets 0 points; this will be given for those who are not a part of the tournament (either because the player has exited or did not join since the beginning)
Note: In addition to this, there is also something called as “Unpaired Bye” where a player is given 1 point because he/she did not have an opponent to be paired with. You can read about this in our article about the BYEs – LINK.
For example, 17/20 players have joined this tournament:
Initial players joined
After clicking ‘Finalize Players’, you will be able to proceed with the tournaments (first round pairings, and so on) with the 17 players who have joined. As you can see below, the players who didn’t join will be shown at the bottom and their status will remain ‘Invited‘ – so they can still join the tournament at a later time:
Players who didn’t join shown at the bottom with ‘Invited’ status
1) Players Joining Late
Now let’s assume that the players Jack (student_28) and James (student_37), who didn’t join the tournament initially, are joining before the start of the 3rd round; i.e. they are joining late:
Player joining the tournament late
Now in the ‘Players‘ tab of the tournament, you will see their status changed from ‘Invited’ to ‘Joined’. Now let’s proceed to publishing the pairings for Round-3:
Player status changed from ‘Invited’ to ‘Joined’
In the ‘Pairings‘ tab, you will see that these two players (Jack (student_28) and James (student_37)) will have Half Bye for Round-1 and Zero Bye for Round-2:
In ‘Pairings‘ tab – Late Joiners getting Half Bye for Round-1 and Zero Bye for missed (absent) rounds
Similarly, they would be at the bottom of the ‘Rankings‘ for the rounds they missed:
In ‘Rankings‘ tab – Late Joiners are at the bottom
2) Players Exiting the Tournament
After a player(s) exits the tournament (LINK), his/her status will be changed from ‘Joined’ to ‘Exited’ in the ‘Players‘ tab. In this example, let’s assume that Peter (student_35) has exited the tournament:
Player status changes to ‘Exited’
Also, notice that the exited player(s) is excluded from pairings and he/she will have a Zero Bye since the player is absent:
The exited player can also rejoin the tournament before the tournament completion as explained here – LINK