It depends. Tournaments use different types of tie-breaking prodecures.
For example, any or all of the following may be used:
http://www.swissperfect.com/tiebreak.htm
I won first place in a tourney in 2010, based upon tie-breaks. In that tournament the tie-breaks were in order, were Modified Median, Solkoff, and Cumulative. In my case the order wouldn’t have mattered, since I was fortunate to come out ahead on all three of those individual tie-breakers.
Modified Median: add up all of the final tournaments scores of all of your opponents but throw out the low score.
Solkoff: add up all of the final scores of your opponents (don’t throw out the low)
Cumulative: add up the running total of your round-by-round tournament standing score. (Example: 1 2 3 4 4.5 5 = 19.5)
If you supplied the entire tournament crosstable, I could probably figure it out for you which method was used, assuming you're correct with your 18.5 and 17 figures.
hey, gys i'm wondering how are tie points calculated I was tying first with this gy in a live tournament and he came up first with tie points of 18.5 and I had tie points of 17. How are these calculated?