How To: Use a House Player

The term House Player is used to describe an individual who is not a participant in the tournament but is willing to play one or more games as a filler to avoid giving anyone an odd-player bye. This can be a spectator or parent. Sometimes a tournament official may volunteer if they have limited duties during the times games are played. Use of a house player is an alternative to a Cross Section pairing or Cross Round pairing to avoid having a player (involuntarily) sit out a round.

How you handle this depends upon how strong the house player is relative to the person who receives a bye. If the house player is at least of similar strength (perhaps within a few hundred points) of the player with the forced bye, you would probably just pair the section normally, add the house player to the section by normal means and do a manual pairing with the house player and the odd player. (The manual pairing dialog has an "Assign Colors" button which will assign the colors based upon the color history of the odd player). Just make sure you withdraw/make inactive the house player so this won't affect the next pairings for the next round. You might also consider putting the game into an Additional Rated Games section instead of into the main section. That has two advantages:

1.Because the house player is never actually in the main section, you don't have to worry about making sure to withdraw him.

2.If you put the game into the main section and the player who had the bye loses, that player will likely get the bye again in the next round. If you allow the player to keep their bye, they won't get a bye in the future, but will still get a rated game.

The use of a house player when the volunteer is significantly higher rated than the player who would ordinarily receive the bye is more complicated. If you don't want to have this extra game be an uncompetitive mismatch, you can instead add the house player to the section with a proper number of byes for earlier rounds to put him into a higher score group. This gives you an even number of players so no one will get a forced bye. A choice that would be least likely to affect the tournament overall would be to put the house player into a score group where he would be a bottom half player. For instance, if this is round 4 and the 2-1 score group has players from 1900 to 1500 and the house player is a 1600, giving the house player full points for R1 and R2 and zero for R3 will have him paired up in that score group. Again, make sure to withdraw the house player after you have paired the round so he is out before you pair the next round.