Tie Break points EXPLAINED

For a long time I was confused about tie break points as many players are, so I would like to share an important detail that is often overlooked in explanations:

TYPICAL (INCOMPLETE) EXPLANATION:

Your tie-break points come from winning and drawing games in the tournament. When you win a game, you get tie-break points equal to your opponents regular tournament points. When you draw you get half of that number. 

HERE IS THE PART I DID NOT REALIZE AT FIRST:

As the tournament progresses, and that opponent that you beat gets wins, your tie break score goes up. At first I thought the timing of when you beat them would matter, because I thought that you were assigned tie break points only at the time when that particular game ended based on your opponents current score. This is not true... your tie break points are essentially calculated at the end of the entire tournament round, once everyone is done. Yes, they give you a running total, but it changes. Even if you win no more games in the round, your tie break score can go up.

EXAMPLE:

The simplest example is in "knockout" tournaments, where you only play one other person. If each player gets a win, they both move on to the next round because it is a tie for tournament points AND a tie for tie-break points. If the tie-break score was only calculated at the end of a game and not revised, then whoever won the first game would get zero tiebreak points because the opponent has won no games yet (this is indeed what happens, but stick with me here). After the second game, the opponent wins, and since YOU have 1 tournament point now, they would get the tiebreak point and would therefore beat you overall.

BUT THAT IS NOT WHAT HAPPENS. Instead, after the second game, you ALSO get a tie break point, because of your earlier win (which is now worth one point). I hope that makes sense!

thank you for the explanation

Great explanation, thank you!

one person wins, then the other person wins

player 1 wins

player 2 loses

now player 1 defeated player 2 and gets player 2's points as their own tiebreak points, which is 0

player 1 loses

player 2 wins

player 2 gets 1 tiebreak point because player 1 has 1 point

but now, player 2 has 1 point, so the previous 0 tie break points for player 1 becomes 1.

so it is a double tie.

ie. at the end both of them have a win against the other, so both of them have 1 point.

each of them have 1 tie break point from beating the other, because the other has 1 point at the end

btw, this is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonneborn%E2%80%93Berger_score

It is more complicated than that. See article 13
https://handbook.fide.com/files/handbook/C02Standards.pdf 

So a knockout tournament is really a tournament where people don't get knocked out?

Sorry to be dense about this.  I think of March Madness as a knockout tournament.  The teams that lose are out, the winners all have one win.  Then the round of 32 the teams that lose are out, the teams that win advance, all have two wins, all beat teams with one win....  Is knockout in chess different from that?

its the same 

but to lose, losing 1 game is not enough

you have to get less than 50% in x matches, however much that is i.e best of x

so it is knockout, but a match isnt just 1 game, its many games

(i think)

Ok

Thank you! This is very useful.