Could Not Reproduce Pair-Up/Down Bugged with Byes

azax

New member
In a tournament, if a player receives a pair-down and the pool of players they can be paired down against includes any players who have received a bye in that tournament, the pair-up will go to one of those players.

E.g. in this prelim (<-- link) I just played, I received a round 1 bye. As the only player who received a bye in the event, I was paired up both in round 3 (as a 1-1 against a 2-0) and in round 4 (as a 2-1 against a 3-0). Had another player received a round 2 bye, then those pairups would have gone to either me or them.

My friends and I (who all play a lot of MTGO) have observed this in many events (prelims and Challenges) and never observed a counterexample; it's not me freaking out over a single event, or the ever-present "Ponder bug" nonsense.

From a competitive integrity standpoint, this makes byes in Swiss events even more advantageous — after a player who receives a round 1 bye takes their first loss, they are guaranteed all future pairups against X-0s. This is extremely strong for their tiebreakers should they need to breaker in to top 8.
 

MTGO_TonyM

Developer
After extensive testing, we were not able to reproduce this issue 100% of the time nor locate a piece of code directing the algorithm to favor the choice of the bye player in pair-downs.

We agree that the events that were reported had unusual behavior (one event was a roughly 1 in 1000 chance), but they were within the bounds of randomness.
 
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