Tiebreakers, explained

The chain

Standings rank by Match wins first (Swiss formats rank by win percentage, since players' game counts can differ mid-event). When players are level, the tiebreakers you've added on Scoring settings apply in order — each one is tried until the tie breaks, and anything below it is never consulted for that tie.

Which ones appear depends on the match format — single-game blocks have no game-based breakers to offer — and on the draw format.

Quality of opponents

Offered on a Swiss or Flexible Swiss competition, and only there. It measures the field a player faced: add up the final win percentage of every opponent, one term per game played against them, and the higher total ranks higher. Two players on the same percentage are separated by who played the harder opponents.

A round robin is not offered it. Everyone faces the same field, so the totals differ only by which result each player cannot count against themselves — a step in the chain that separates nobody.

Two things follow from "final":

1. The figures move all event. An opponent's percentage is whatever it ends at, so a tie that quality of opponents settles on Saturday can settle differently on Sunday. That is the measure working, not a fault, but it means the order is not final until the last game is in.
2. A game against a player who later withdraws still counts as a game, but that player has no final percentage in the table, so it adds nothing to the total.

This is the same figure the qualifying table uses to split a seeding tie — see below — so an event that declares quality of opponents in its conditions can set it in both places and get the same arithmetic.

Head-to-head with three or more level

Two players level are separated by who beat whom. Three or more level are a mini-league: only the games among the tied players count, and they are ranked on wins in those games. A group can stay level there — A beat B, B beat C and C beat A leaves all three on one win each.

With head-to-head in the chain, a 3+ way ties checkbox decides what happens next:

• Ticked — any still level are separated by net hoops (net points in AC, net SF in Advantage GC) in those same games among the tied players, before the chain moves on.
• Unticked — any still level go straight to the next tiebreaker in your list, which is measured across the whole block; with nothing below head-to-head they share a place until you set the order.

The line under the checkbox on Scoring settings states the sequence for your exact chain, and the same sentence is printed under the public standings when Explain the tiebreakers is on.

Head-to-head in a cross block

Under cross block the blocks play each other, so no two players in a paired block have ever met. Head-to-head finds no games between them, separates nobody, and the tie falls through to whatever you put next in the chain. It costs nothing to leave in — the standings come out the same either way — but put something below it, or a tie that reaches it stays unbroken.

Blocks pair in order, so an odd block at the end plays within itself and head-to-head works there exactly as it always did. That is why the tool does not take head-to-head off the list for a cross-block competition: the chain is set per competition, but whether head-to-head can bite is decided block by block.

The compiled Event details on the public page follows the same rule. With every block paired it leaves head-to-head out of that competition's chain and says why; with an odd block it keeps it and says it only applies in the block that plays within itself.

Why the order matters

Net hoops before head-to-head says the whole-block record outranks the results within the tied group; head-to-head first says "you beat them, you finish above them" even if your other scores were narrower. Neither is wrong — they're different sporting philosophies, which is exactly why the tool makes you choose and lets you publish the choice.

Telling the players

Explain the tiebreakers on the public standings prints the rules in force under each public table — and, when a tiebreaker actually decided a place, which places and which one. The explanation always shows the chain as it currently stands, so editing the chain mid-event changes what's published under the standings too.

WCF placings

A Golf Croquet round robin run under the WCF Sports Regulations can use WCF placings (Appendix 6) in place of a chain (Scoring settings). The button is shown only to accounts with the WCF Championship permission; other managers never see it. It splits ties in two by where they fall:

In a play-off the order of the group before play (its MAP ranking) decides byes and who needs beating twice; it does not decide who qualifies. See Block play-off.

When the chain can't break it

Some ties survive every breaker — identical records, or a rule the app doesn't model (a play-off, a countback). That's what the finishing order editor is for: set the order by hand, record joint places, and the public standings say the order was set by the manager rather than crediting a tiebreaker. The Your own wording field covers the rule you actually used.

The qualifying table is not ordered by this chain

Where a competition's results feed a cut that counts another competition's games as well — a Progressive Swiss — the view that decides who goes through is the qualifying table, and it is ordered by percentage of games won, with ties resolved under CA Reg F5(4).

F5(4) reads: "The winner, or qualifiers, shall be those with the greatest percentage of games won… In the event of a tie between two or more players who have all played each other, the winner is the player who has won the most games in the games between them."

Which process, and where you choose it

The two regulations disagree, and a manager's own conditions bind their event — so the handover asks. Pathway ▸ Edit on the cut, under How a qualifying tie is resolved:

Beside it, How a seeding tie is split — quality of opponents (default) or the game between them — which orders the draw once the qualifiers are known and plays no part in who qualifies. Both are printed on the qualifying table, so a reader can check the page against your info sheet and find the same rule in each.

The 2025 Championship of the South of England declared, in writing: "the process described in Regulation F3d will be used, with the backstop of net hoops rather than shortened tie-break games… The draw will be seeded by percentage wins with ties resolved by quality of opponents." That is F3(d) plus quality of opponents, which is what those two settings say.

Why the default is F5(4)

The condition carries weight. The games among a tied group are used only where every player in that group has played every other. In a Flexible Swiss most of the field never meets, so this is the usual case rather than the exception — and without the condition one game between two of them would outrank players who were never involved. Where the group is incomplete, the tie falls to net hoops across the counted games. That is not in F5, whose own fallback is a played tie-break or shared places; it stands as the event's declared backstop, and a tie it cannot separate is reported as level for you to rule on with the finishing order editor.

Note F3, the strict Swiss, differs on both counts: it places players on matches won rather than percentage of games, and its equivalent step — "any group of players still tied shall be separated by the number of matches won in the matches played between those players" — carries no such condition.

The chain set here orders a block's or a pool's own standings table. Setting it does not change the qualifying table, and in a Progressive Swiss — where the pool-only table is not drawn, because the combined record is the competition — it has nothing to order.

Related

• Scoring settings — building the chain.
• Knockout setup — why settled orders matter when brackets seed from blocks.