Double round robin
A double round-robin tournament is a round-robin format in which every pair of players meets twice, once with each color, so each player plays every opponent as both White and Black.
Doubling the schedule removes the one thing a single round robin cannot fix: the luck of colors. In a double round robin each player gets White once and Black once against every opponent, so each player's total colors are equal and no rivalry is decided by who held the white pieces. A field of eight needs fourteen rounds, which is why the format is common for small elite events such as a Candidates tournament, where results at the top must be hard to argue with.
The Title Regulations list the double round robin among the formats that may be used for title norms. It has its own rule for the opponent mix: a double round robin needs at least six players, and the required number of titled opponents is half, rounded up, instead of the usual fraction.
Tiebreaks suited to round robins, such as the Koya System and Sonneborn-Berger, are the natural choice, and Buchholz is not allowed in them. Read round robin for the single version, and candidates tournament for a famous example of the format.
A neighboring idea is Invitational tournament. An invitational tournament is an event where the organizer chooses the participants, so entry depends on an invitation instead of a registration form and an entry fee.
How "Double round robin" 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 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.
The Candidates Tournament is the FIDE event, played by eight qualifiers, whose winner becomes the challenger in the next World Championship match against the reigning champion.
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.
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.
A norm is a tournament result that meets the FIDE title standard for performance rating and opponent mix; several norms across enough games can earn a title, but one norm alone does not.
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 B.01 FIDE Title Regulations, effective 1 January 2024, Clauses 1.4.2 and 1.4.5, read Oct 21, 2026.
- FIDE Handbook C.07 Play-Off and Tie-Break Regulations, effective 1 March 2026, Articles 8, 9.1 and 9.2, read Oct 21, 2026.
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