What's a tie-breaker (in the Chess.com tournament sense), and how does it work?

A lot of people seem to need classification on this lately.

A tiebreaker is used when two players in the same tournament group have the same score at the end of a round. The player with the highest tiebreaker score wins.

Tiebreakers are calculated via the formula:

(Score of opponents you win against) + (Score of opponents you draw against x 0.5)

Note that if you beat the same opponent twice, this means you will get twice his score added to your tiebreaker. (Once for each win.)

Interesting, and what happens if two players have the same tie breaker number at the end of a round?

Laporte, dont say that! This system wasnt devised by chess.com, it was designed by a respected man. So be quiet and dont complain about things just because you didnt think of them.

If two players have the same tiebreak, they have performed equally well, and both move on to the next round.

I don't think I've ever read a response from laporte that was not angry and bitter.

Note:  my response here was due to a post that has now been deleted.

Gentlemen, I didn't mean to start a slag-fest. I will only reiterate what Dr. Johnson reputedly said: "It's not important that something should be easy to understand . . . but it should be impossible to mis-understand". No system is perfect, and I would have been happy if there had been a link explaining the tie-break method.

Let's not get bitchy about each other's opinions. I recommend all chess players should read the poem "Death the Leveller" by James Shirley. It includes the line . . . "they tame but one another still". Oh, and Happy Christmas.

Here is the link to the tie break explanation in tournament help. It depends on each of the tied players having different results against all the other players in the group.

It can fail to break a tie. In a group of two each of the tied players has the same result against the other player in the group. It always fails.

As the number of players in the group increases it becomes more successful.