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Not that it is of earth-shattering importance, but how is a Swiss bye entered in the Result header by default? 1-0? +? +-? +--? Is it different from a forfeit? (The latter can be additionally indicated by the "termination" tag, but I never saw it used, probably because the player field implies it...neither did I ever fill out this tag on a time loss as arbiter since nobody seems to care anyway, flag is a "normal" loss...)

PGN standard didn't answer my question. (And checking a random PGN might lead to a random result, see above.

SecretAgentMan
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Hauke Reddmann
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    This is one of those trick questions, isn't it? Like "A plane flying from country A to country B crashes in country C. Where are the survivors buried?" In this case, if a player gets a bye then there is no opponent, no game and therefore no PGN. There isn't even a first move as there would be when the opponent doesn't turn up. – Brian Towers May 06 '22 at 14:27
  • @Brian: Not so! I asked with respect to a practical example, i.e. the games of my town's youth championship. The organisation is...not as perfect as a FIDE title match :-) Some games are incomplete due to gruesome writing. Some are plain amiss due to work overload of the organizers. A PGN entry "Patzer-Bye 1-0" in the PGN is very helpful to me, since it tells me Patzer got the bye (in contrast to, say, he won against Fisch but the game wasn't recorded), and even the round when it happened. I.e. it is sensible to enter byes as "dummy" PGN heads. – Hauke Reddmann May 06 '22 at 18:30
  • Perhaps the tags may have: [White "player_name"] [Black "?"] [Result "1-0"] [Termination "bye"]. In the case for Dubov forfeiting some games due to positive PCR test, it can be: [White "Carlsen, Magnus"] [Black "Dubov, Daniil"] [Result "1-0"] [Termination "emergency"] – ferdy May 07 '22 at 14:54
  • I put an issue on the pgn standard that I tried to maintain. – ferdy May 07 '22 at 15:03
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    @ferdy: For the record, the PGN of the championship I mentioned put a "kampflos" (=bye) into the "Black" header (consistent, you always play White against the bye). Also a possibility. (I doubt they even knew a "termination" tag exists in the standard - I didn't knew either before I checked :-) – Hauke Reddmann May 07 '22 at 18:25
  • The disadvantage of using [Black "bye"] is that bye is now a player name. With ? it is unknown. The advantage of using [Black "bye"] is that we don't even need the termination tag [Termination "bye"] because bye as the player playing black is not a real player name. But again the termination tag is created to describe the reason on the conclusion of the game and the [Black "?"] is perfectly a valid tag. – ferdy May 08 '22 at 01:56
  • @ferdy: BTW, FIDE rating list has dozens of (mostly Scandinavian) players named "Bye", the troll potential (and I don't mean the Scandinavian variety :-) being high... – Hauke Reddmann May 08 '22 at 07:08
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    @ferdy: Addendum. Today I wrote up the PGN of the match I was arbiter in. A forfeit occured. My standard PGN reader neither accepted +- nor +-- as result. – Hauke Reddmann May 08 '22 at 16:07
  • So that reader complies with the result specs to be only ['1-0', '0-1', '1/2-1/2', '*']. – ferdy May 08 '22 at 16:48
  • @ferdy: THX, I already suspected * is the correct entry. – Hauke Reddmann May 09 '22 at 08:49
  • I have seen games without moves and with a result registered. This is because someone does not present to the game. But a bye is only an artifact for the swiss pairing algorithm, and as such its entry (1 point) is only valid inside the score table. – djnavas May 11 '22 at 04:10
  • BTW, Viktors Pūpols once saw a guy preparing for the game against BYE. Viktors introduced himself as Billy Bye, shook hands and played a simul between board 1 and like 40. Won both of course. Poor guy handed in the scoresheet, 0-1 Bye. TD had a good laugh... – Peter Fischer Jul 12 '22 at 05:50

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I suspect that the PGN standard does answer your question, though perhaps indirectly.

8.1.1.7 says that the content of the Result tag "is always exactly the same as the game termination marker that concludes the associated movetext."

8.2.6 says: "The game termination marker is a symbol that is one of the following four values: "1-0" (White wins), "0-1" (Black wins), "1/2-1/2" (drawn game), and "*" (game in progress, result unknown, or game abandoned)."

So, no +- or other similar combination allowed. "1-0" is allowed, but seems fundamentally wrong for a bye game -- unless you keep the score to yourself and only use it with PGN software that doesn't interpret that as a real win.

It seems safer to use "*", and add a non-standard PGN tag to indicate that the game was a bye game for a particular player. (That is basically what ferdy suggests in his comment, but it seems unwise to extend an already established and defined tag (i.e. Termination) unilaterally.) This seems to be less disruptive of already existing software.

If the information is for human use only, use "*" and add a movetext comment to the effect that this is a bye game.

PGN was not designed to support FIDE rules. It was designed to be extensible, at least as far as tag pairs go.