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A bye is when a player or team is allowed to advance to the next round of a playoff tournament without playing. This most commonly occurs if the number of entrants into the competition is not a power of two (i.e. not 4, 8, 16, 32, etc.), thus resulting in an odd number at some point. In large tournaments, sometimes the best-ranked players or teams get a bye in the first round(s), to reward them with less risk of elimination, as well as on the basis (particularly in seeded tournaments) that they would be most likely to eliminate the worst seeds anyway. Byes can be applied equally to single-person competitions and team sports, and well as to single-game eliminations and best-of series eliminiations.

In some tournaments, a player can elect to take a half-point bye for one round and not play.

In the NFL, the two division winners from each of the two conferences with the best record are rewarded with a bye in the playoffs. This is sometimes referred to as a bye week, as one round is played per week. This is necessitated by the current 12-team playoff structure. Eight is the next lowest power of 2, so 4 teams must be eliminated in the first week before the 4 first-week winners continue in the playoff tournament with the 4 remaining teams. The NFL is the only one of the "Big Four" North American sports leagues to offer playoff byes. The CFL also grants a bye to its two division winners, directly to the division finals as four other teams compete in a semi-final week.

In Canadian and American football in general, the term "bye week" is often erroneously used to refer to any week during the regular season in which a team does not have a game. Each NFL team will have one "bye week" during a normal season, between weeks 3 and 10[1]. Unlike the above traditional usage, there is no advancement or tournament benefit from the missed week. The NFL has used the bye week since 1990 so as to extend the regular season schedule to 17 weeks, although between 1999 and 2002 byes had to be scheduled every week because the league had 31 teams. Traditionally, the CFL and Arena Football have scheduled byes only in seasons when they have had an odd number of teams in their leagues, however the CFL has introduced a scheduled bye week for its (currently eight) teams for the 2007 season.

In leagues such as Australasia's National Rugby League (NRL) where competition points are used to determine standings, the bye also garners points (in the NRL's case, two, equivalent to a win).