A bye in sports (and certain other competitions) refers to organizers scheduling a competitor not to participate in a given round of competition, due to one of several circumstances.

In double elimination tournaments they can be granted either to reward the highest-ranked participant(s) or assigned randomly – to make a working bracket if the number of participants is not a power of two (e.g. 16 or 32).

In round-robin tournaments or leagues, usually, one competitor gets a bye in each round when there are an odd number of competitors, as it is impossible for all competitors to play in the same round. However, over the whole tournament, each plays the same number of games as well as sitting out for the same number of rounds.