Tie-breaks in a table

Before the tie-break: how the table is scored

A tie is a tie on something, so start there. Some tables count wins. Softball, curling and pickleball rank first on the win and loss record.

Others convert results to points. Goalball and cerebral palsy football give 3 points for a win, 1 for a draw and 0 for a loss. Basketball and table tennis give 2 for a win and 1 for a loss. Chess gives 1 for a win, a half for a draw and 0 for a loss, unless the event's regulations say otherwise.

The round robin page has the full list.

The kinds of tie-breaker

The match between the tied sides. Usually called head-to-head. It comes first in curling, softball, pickleball, basketball, tug of war and wheelchair tennis, and third in judo. Chess calls it direct encounter.

A margin over all matches. These reward winning by a lot and losing by a little.

The same margin, counting only the tied sides. Goalball applies goal difference a second time, on only the games between the teams still level. Pickleball does the same with point differential. Basketball and cerebral palsy football put this version first, ahead of the margin over the whole group.

A ratio, where others use a difference. Table tennis compares the ratio of wins to losses, in individual matches, then games, then points. Olympic water polo separates teams across groups by goal average, which it defines as goals scored divided by games played.

The strength of your opponents. Chess, in tournaments where players have not all met the same field, uses Buchholz: the sum of the scores of each of your opponents.

Your result against the best team outside the tie. Para ice hockey, if three teams cannot be separated on their games against each other, looks at how each did against the closest best-ranked team outside the tied group, and then the next. Sailing's match racing rules have the same idea: the most points against the competitor placed highest in the round robin, then against the second highest.

A separate test. Curling's Draw Shot Challenge is the average distance from the centre of the draws each team throws before its games. It measures skill and has nothing to do with the results.

Discipline. Judo ranks the athlete with fewer penalties higher. Tug of war counts cautions. Cerebral palsy football keeps a conduct score: a yellow card costs a point, a red card after two yellows costs three and a straight red costs four.

Something physical. Tug of war's fourth test is team weight, and the lighter team goes through.

The most recent result. In a sailing round robin where two competitors have met more than once, the tie goes to whoever won the last match between them.

The ranking coming in. Wheelchair tennis falls back on the players' rankings at the time of seeding. Curling's last line is the member association's world ranking. Basketball uses the FIBA ranking for national teams, and para ice hockey the seeding the teams arrived with.

Chance. Softball ends with a coin flip, as does flag football. Wheelchair tennis, chess, table tennis and cerebral palsy football end with drawing lots.

Two philosophies

Read enough lists and they fall into two camps.

One camp holds that a tie should be settled by the tied teams' own meetings and nothing else. Table tennis is the purest case: the relative positions are decided "only by the results of the matches between them", and if that fails, by lot. What a player did against the rest of the group never comes into it.

The other camp looks at the whole table first. Goalball starts with goal difference over the entire round robin, and reaches the games between the tied teams only third.

Most sports mix the two, and the order of the mixture is the thing to read.

That grouping is this page's reading of the lists. No rule book describes itself that way.

Why three tied is different from two

With two sides level, the match between them gives an answer. With three it may not, as in the softball example.

So the rule books treat the cases separately. Wheelchair tennis is explicit: if two players are tied, head-to-head applies. If three or more are tied, head-to-head is not the first test. The list runs through matches won, sets and games. Para ice hockey says the same in its own way: for two teams the game between them decides, and a formula exists only for three or more.

In the softball example, the first criterion gives "no decision", and the second, Team's Quality Balance, places all three: Team B, then Team A, then Team C.

A three-way tie, worked through

Basketball's rules print one, and it shows the mini-table at work. Four teams play once each.

A is fourth. B, C and D are level, and each has beaten one of the others and lost to one. So a second table is drawn up from only the three games among them.

The win-loss record is still level, so the next test applies: points difference in the games between them. C is first, D second and B third.

Notice what has been thrown away. C's 45-point win over A, the biggest result in the group, plays no part. Under a rule that started with the difference over all games, the order would still have been C, D, B here, but by a very different road, and in other groups the two methods disagree.

Starting again from the top

When a tie-breaker separates one side from a group of three, what happens to the two left? The answers differ.

• Goalball says to use the criteria in order until one team is separated, then start again from the beginning for the teams that remain.
• Basketball says the same: once a team is classified, the procedure is repeated from the start for those left.
• Table tennis goes one step further and removes the separated player's matches from the sums before recalculating.
• Wheelchair tennis says that once only two remain tied, their head-to-head result decides.
• Para ice hockey continues its sub-group "until only two or none of the teams remain tied".
• Softball's quality balance, by contrast, places all the tied teams at once.

The difference matters. Under a restart rule, the second and third of three tied teams are often separated by the match between them, even though that match did not help while three were level.

Limits on the margin

A margin rule gives a strong team a reason to keep scoring against a beaten opponent. One rule book read for this page puts a ceiling on that. In cerebral palsy football, no more than a 10-goal difference from any single match counts in the table. A 10-0 win and an 11-1 win both go in as plus 10, although the real score is recorded.

When the answer is to play again

Some ties are not calculated at all. Judo holds a deciding contest where a shared place is not allowed. Chess tournaments may settle places with play-off games. Curling can use ranking games where qualification points depend on the order.

Fencing uses both approaches in the same competition. At the senior World Championships, a tie for the sixteenth place that earns a pass through the next round is settled by a barrage, an extra bout to five hits.

When the tie is left alone

Not every tie has to be broken.

The same fencing rules say that if fencers are exactly equal for the last qualifying place out of the pools, there is no barrage and all of them qualify, even if that exceeds the number planned. Curling ranks teams equal when they are eliminated together and nothing depends on the order. Chess asks each tournament to say in advance whether tied players share a place or are separated.

A tie-break costs something: a coin toss or a decimal place decides who goes home. Where nothing depends on the order, several rule books prefer not to pretend.

When you can know your tie-break

FIDE sorts chess tie-breaks by when their value becomes known, and the idea travels well to other sports.

A head-to-head result is known as soon as that match is over. A team's own goal difference is known to it at every moment of its last match. But a measure built on other teams' results, such as Buchholz or para ice hockey's comparison against the best-ranked outsider, is not known until those teams have finished too.

This is why the order of the last round matters, and why a team can leave the field without knowing whether it has qualified.

It changes from event to event

The one thing to remember: read the first item on the list. If it is head-to-head, the match between the two rivals is worth more than its points. If it is a margin such as goal difference, every goal in every match counts, and a team cannot ease off once it is ahead.