How are they calculated?
As I understand it, it is the number of points you got against a team times the number of points that that team scored. That is if you scored 3-1 against a team that ended up with 2 1/2 match points you’d get 7.5 tiebreak points.
Alex Relyea
Thanks, I appreciate the response!
Just to confirm, in a 4 round tournament, for the teams with plus scores (tied for 1st place), lowest tiebreak product score does NOT get dropped, right?
Michael
Rulebook citation is 34G2, and there is nothing there about dropping anyone.
Alex Relyea
Tie-breaks, whether in an individual or team tournament, are not used to determine which player (or team) in a score group with an odd number of players gets paired down into the next score group. Rather, the lowest-rated player (or team) gets paired down. (There may be minor transpositions to improve colors or for other reasons, so the second- or third-lowest may get paired down instead.)
Tie-breaks are used only at the end of the tournament, to determine which of two or more tied players wins an indivisible prize, such as a trophy, clock, or title.
Bill Smythe
I think there’s some confusion about the use of “dropping.” The posters aren’t talking about pairings. They are referring to dropping the highest/lowest opponent in Modified Median tiebreak. Alex is correct that this is not done with the Barry System (a term a prefer to the clumsy “U.S. Amateur Team System”).
Yes, John is correct, I was talking about determining the 1st place trophy winner on tie-breaks, not the pairings.
Here is the link below for the eloquent write-up by Selby Anderson of the situation that led me to asking this question. I have the consent of all the people involved to publish their opening preferences and other personal information.
Possible lessons:
a) if you are going to entertain challenges to the pairings, don’t start some games early.
b) don’t compute tiebreaks in your head and hand out trophies based on those computations.
c) review all late round pairings BEFORE posting them
d) (this is a “BUT”) - don’t change pairings just because someone complains and the pairing they want is a valid pairing - change only when the compter pairing is a patently INvalid one. I suspect that this was NOT the case here.