Tiebreak
A method for ranking players who finish a tournament with the same score, without an additional decisive game.
Common chess tiebreak systems include Buchholz, Sonneborn-Berger, and direct head-to-head results, each weighting the strength of opponents faced differently.
Etymology
The “tie” in tiebreak is Old English teag; the sense “equality between competitors” is attested by the 1670s “from the notion of a connecting link,” with the noun tie-breaker recorded from 1938. Chess's tie-breaking systems, however, are far older than the word tie-breaker, and are mostly eponyms: the Neustadtl score is named after Hermann Neustadtl, who proposed it in a letter published in Chess Monthly in 1882, while a similar system was first proposed by Oscar Gelbfuhs in 1873 at the Vienna International tournament. The familiar “Sonneborn–Berger” label is itself a misnomer: Sonneborn criticised the Neustadtl score in 1886 and proposed a variant, and Berger studied and adopted that approach in 1887–1888. Other chess tiebreaks are likewise personal names: the Harkness System (Kenneth Harkness), the Solkoff system (introduced to the US by Ephraim Solkoff in 1950), and the Kashdan system (Isaac Kashdan).
First documented: 1873 — Oscar Gelbfuhs's tie-break proposal at the Vienna International tournament, 1873
Translations
Translations for this term haven't been added yet.