S: I'm not sure what to do with the odd give number of players
A: Try to divide 26 by 2 since half of the players have to get byes
S: I cannot see how that is going to work since the 2nd round will have 10 matches which isn't half of 7 matches in the 1st
A: Try having all the playing in round 1 except one
s: I'm not sure what to do with this extra person in the 3rd round. It makes sense to give the person a bye to the 4th round but the problem only mentioned byes in the byes in the 1st round
A: Maybe the first round isn't the only place that players received a bye. Therefore there are 5 rounds 2 byes and the 26 matches. So in a tournament with N
players, there will be N-1 matches
S: looking back on the problem, I have a few problems with the odd numbers which don't divide evenly.
A: Maybe that is how we can figure out how many byes we'll have all together. Every time we get an odd number of winners in a round we'll get a bye....
S: I'm not sure if the question with N players is using the same method as the problem uses
A: Try some other tournaments with different numbers of players and see how many matches they get...