The Reaping

The reaping is an annual event that takes place in every district before each Hunger Games, where the tributes of the upcoming Games are chosen.

Each district's escort randomly chooses the name of one male and one female tribute from two separate glass balls. Those picked are then the official tributes for the upcoming Games. To be qualified for a reaping, one must be twelve years old. Once of age, a potential-tribute's name is entered into the reaping one time. The entries are cumulative, so when a possible tribute is thirteen, their name is added one more time. This continues until age 18, when a potential-tribute's name is entered 7 times.

Each age group is contained in roped-off areas in the town square, waiting for someone to be picked. The reapings take place at different times in different districts, so that Capitol citizens can watch them all live on television. Many members of the public, who show little to no sympathy for the potential tributes, often place bets on who will be chosen. Unless someone is already on their deathbed, they receive the death penalty for not attending their district's reaping.

The District 12 reaping takes place in the center of town. For the 74th Hunger Games, Effie Trinket chose the names in District 12.

Volunteering
If someone so chooses, he or she may take the place of a tribute in a process known as volunteering. This is often done by Careers, individuals who spend their lives training to compete in the Hunger Games. It is sometimes done for other reasons, though, such as when Katniss Everdeen volunteered to protect her reaped sister, Prim.

The volunteering process is simple in most districts, especially the later ones. But in earlier districts, such as the Career districts, (1, 2, and 4) volunteering is a more complicated process since the Games are seen as a way to achieve fame.

Tesserae
For the residents of various districts, any child between the ages of twelve through eighteen, if it is needed, can apply for tessera. This supplies them with a meager year's supply of grain and oil. They can choose to do this for each of their family members as well. However, each tesserae they sign up for puts another slip with their name in the reaping glass jar. It is also cumulative, so Katniss Everdeen, when she was sixteen, had her name put in the glass ball twenty times. Gale Hawthorne, who has five family members including himself, had his name put in the glass ball forty-two times.

25th Hunger Games
In the reaping of the 25th Hunger Games, contestants were chosen by the residents of their district rather than drawn from the reaping ball.

50th Hunger Games
In the reaping of the 50th Hunger Games, two tributes were drawn from each reaping ball rather than the usual one tribute, causing there to be 24 extra tributes fighting in the arena, registering a total of 48 tributes. This is the Games where Haymitch Abernathy competed with Maysilee Donner, resulting in Haymitch as the victor (he won by outsmarting the other tributes).

75th Hunger Games
In the 75th Hunger Games, the pool of available tributes shrunk rapidly as only previous victor's names were in the reaping balls. In some districts, such as District 12, there were few living victors of each gender, and in District Twelve's case, there was only one female and two males (Katniss and Haymitch/Peeta), but it was easily decided which male would be in the Games. Additionally, because most victors had won their games years ago, most were older than the usual twelve to eighteen years old; one tribute, Mags was 80 years old. Peeta and Katniss were the youngest tributes in the 75th Hunger Games, winning the year before.