Due to several requests for it, even at the championship level, with the next version of the software I plan to add the ability to add in players late to a tournament. Technically speaking, this shouldn't be an issue. However, I'm not sure the best way to implement this.
In particular, how should the win-loss record work for someone who is added after the first round? If it's the middle of a round, should I automatically pair them up against the player with the bye, or give them the bye if no other players are available? If I don't do that, do I treat their first match as a win, or as an auto-loss? Should we not permit late adds in any tournaments?
As my software runs now, if a 'late add' were permitted, I suspect that the new players would be treated as having an autoloss, as in they have no wins or points, so would be paired lower. However, I suspect this may also guarantee that they are at the bottom of the pool due to also having no SoS, while the other one losses would have been bested by someone. Thus if there are an odd number of players, they would automatically get the bye, and essentially a free win. This does not seem right.
I'll need to do testing once I'm at that point, but I felt that I should get this out for discussion now, before I end up running into this interesting little caveat further into the development of version 2 of the code.
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