Buchholz
Buchholz is a tiebreak that totals the final scores of every opponent a player met, so that between two players on equal points the one who faced stronger opposition ranks higher.
Also called: Buchholz score
Imagine two players who both finish a Swiss on 6 points. One collected them against opponents who ended near the bottom, the other against people who finished near the top. Buchholz separates them by adding up the final tournament score of each person they played. The larger total belongs to the player whose path was harder.
Those opponent scores are not fixed until the last round ends, so the number can only be completed after the event. FIDE's tie-break regulations list several versions. Fore Buchholz treats every game still being played in the final round as a draw, which lets organizers state a value before the last results arrive. Cut-1 leaves out the lowest opponent score, so a single weak opponent distorts the figure less. The regulations also say how to count rounds that were not played, such as byes and forfeits, so the total reflects what really happened.
One firm limit applies: Buchholz and its relatives must not be used in round robins. Everyone there meets the same field, so the sums would be identical and separate nobody. Check the announcement for the version your event uses. See tiebreak, Sonneborn-Berger and swiss system.
How "Buchholz" applies to your own results depends on where you stand now, and the improvement plans by rating band show what players near your rating work on.
Related terms
A tiebreak is a rule that ranks players who finish on the same score, either by a calculation from the results or by extra games, so that the final standings can be published.
Sonneborn-Berger is a tiebreak that adds, for every game, the opponent's final score multiplied by the points you took from them, so a win over a high finisher counts far more than a win over a low one.
In a Swiss-system tournament the number of rounds is announced in advance, nobody is knocked out, and every round pairs players who have scored about the same so far, never matching the same two players twice.
A pairing is the assignment of two players to meet in a round, together with the colors each will have, and in a Swiss event it is produced fresh after every round.
A round-robin tournament schedules each participant against every other participant exactly once from a fixed table, so the standings involve no pairing choices and an even field of n players needs n minus 1 rounds.
Guides that go further
What a rating measures, how FIDE, Lichess, US Chess and chess.com compute theirs, and why the numbers differ.
How the Candidate Master, FIDE Master, International Master and Grandmaster titles are earned, with every Handbook clause.
The Handbook rules for a first FIDE rating: five rated games, the 1400 floor, the two 1800 draws and a worked example.
Sources
- FIDE Handbook C.07 Play-Off and Tie-Break Regulations, effective 1 March 2026, Articles 8.1 to 8.3, 14.1 and 16, read Oct 21, 2026.
Want to spot this in your own games?
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