What is a tie brek and how is it awarde?

Tiebreaks break ties, usually for a trophy or title or an extra amount of cash - cash prizes are typically divided evenly among those who tie at the end of an event.

The best tiebreak is a playoff, often at rapid or blitz time controls.  Then there are various methods which essentially evaluate the strength of schedule of the tied players; the one who faced the tougher schedule wins.

The tiebreak used on the site is based on the scores of your opponents.

On every tournament page you should see a box to the right with a Help link.

http://www.chess.com/tournaments/help.html

Thank you for help.  In a tourney short of miracle myself and one other will be perfectly tie.  Wondering how math will work out or if we both advance.  Games W&L same against same opponets.   I just watch out of curiosty since I really do not know formula.  Saw examples in tourney rules so I assume we both advance.  I could swear I have seen people behind in points advance over point leader.  Of course that could be active imagination.  Again thanks

Basically you have to do well against those who have high scores.

http://www.chess.com/tournaments/pairings.html?id=33504&round=1

Group #4

	1	2	3	4	5	Score	Tie Break
1.  olegor (1549)	X	1  _	1  1	_  1	1  1	6	8
2.  davejitsu (1469)	_  0	X	1  1	_  1	_ _	3	5
3.  TinyJoe (1508)	0  0	0  0	X	_  1	1  _	2	1
4.  fleischklient (1372)	0  _	0  _	0  _	X	_  1	1	0
5.  lillith (1232)	0  0	_  _	_  0	0  _	X	0	0

Here is another way of calculating the tiebreak.

Take you score against an opponent and multiply it by their total score. Do this for all opponents and add them up.

olegor: 0 * 6 = 0

TinyJoe: 2 * 2 = 4

fleischklient: 1 * 1 = 2

lillith: 0 * 0 = 0

Your current tiebreak: 0 + 4 + 1 + 0 = 5

The tiebreak only comes into play if there is a tie. For that reason you cannot advance if you have a lower score than someone else.

what happens when both are equal