Byes in Up and Down the River
Every court needs exactly four players, so any remainder sits out. Who sits is controlled by Bye Mode, which you choose when you generate.
When a bye group appears
Divide the players who opted in by 4. Anything left over forms the bye group.
With 18 players you get four courts of 4 and a bye group of 2. With 20 you get five full courts and nobody sits.
In the set-partners variant the same maths applies to pairs — courts take two pairs, so an odd pair out sits.
Where you set it
Bye Mode appears in the generation settings, alongside auto-generation configuration. Pick a mode there and it is saved to the division, so later rounds keep using it until you change it.
Two options:
By Position — "Bottom-ranked players/teams sit out" By Rotation — "Everyone takes turns sitting out evenly"
Bye Mode exists for Up and Down the River and Humpty Dumpty only. Other ladder formats handle uneven numbers differently and do not offer this choice.
By Position (the default)
The bottom of the ladder sits out.
Bottom-court losers move into the bye group, and the players currently on bye come back onto the bottom court in their place. The bye still moves around — it follows whoever is losing at the bottom, rather than parking the same people permanently.
Use this when you want sitting out to be the consequence of being at the bottom.
By Rotation
Everyone sits out roughly the same number of times, regardless of ladder position.
Rather than sending bottom-court losers to the bye, the app selects whoever has taken the fewest byes so far. It counts each player's bye history and picks from the lowest.
Players coming back from bye take the court positions of the players going out — a straight swap, so nobody is dumped to the bottom just for returning.
Use this for a social league where sitting out should be shared evenly rather than earned.
What counts as a bye
This is the subtle part, and it decides who rotation mode picks.
A bye is a round you were present for but did not play. It is not simply any round you have no match in.
Someone who joined in week 4, or was checked out for the first three weeks, has no matches in those early rounds — but those are absences, not byes. They do not count.
This is deliberate. If early absences counted as byes, a late joiner would look like they had already sat out several times and would be shielded from future byes — pushing the extra byes onto players who have been there all season.
The app records who actually sat out each round and uses that as the source of truth.
Only one court left
When the league is down to a single real court, losers swap with the bye players rather than moving down to a court that does not exist.
This happens in both modes. It is about there being nowhere below to go, not about your Bye Mode setting.
Choosing a mode
You want | Use |
|---|---|
Sitting out to follow losing at the bottom | By Position |
Everyone to sit out about equally | By Rotation |
A competitive ladder | By Position |
A social league with mixed commitment | By Rotation |
You can change it between rounds. Rotation then balances from the bye history already recorded.