The Vansin
[Option 1 is simple. To maintain the brackets and save you guys time, we could let the three combatants just mosey on to round two. It's no skin off of anyone's back, and it'll make sure this tournament runs clean as a whistle.
This is the only feasible option when you're running a tournament. Also, it's the only fair option, and the only one that makes sense. Just saying; option one is like eating a bowl of ice cream, option two is like shooting your grandmother in the foot.
Byes are not a good or bad thing. They're a means to an end; a function that comes from using a bracketed tournament.It's what happens when you use a bracket, it happens in freestyle wrestling all the time. Someone doesn't make weight, doesn't show up to their match, their opponent gets a bye.
Contrary to what people might think,
this is actually part of how the system works. Byes operate to keep things running smoothly when people disappear, so that you don't have to stop and figure out what to do, or to try and accomodate for missing persons by filling the open spots.
It's actually a useful function, and one that's supposed to be used. It might not be the funnest, but it is the most logical one, and it's also the one that allows for the smoothest operation of the system (bracketed single elim tournament) on the whole from round to round.
Byes have nothing to do with laziness, or giving the people who got byes a break. It's how the goddamn system works, and while it isn't THE FUNNEST EVER, it is fair, and it is efficient. Giving a person another opponent to fight just because of their opponent's actions isn't fair at all, especially not in comparison to giving byes, which is pretty much just a neutral by product of how this all works.
I've gotten byes before, and it's not fun to just advance with no roleplaying or anything like that because you're opponent didn't show up, but the entire tournament shouldn't be slowed down because like 1/20th of the participants didn't get an opponent, nor is it fair to pair them with someone else when their bye is a result of their opponent's actions, not their own.
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