Sonneborn-Berger
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.
Sonneborn-Berger, shortened to SB, asks a different question from Buchholz. Buchholz asks how strong your opponents were. SB asks how well you did against the strong ones. For each opponent, multiply their final score by what you got from them: one for a win, a half for a draw, nothing for a loss. Then add up the products.
A small picture helps. Suppose two players finish level, and one of them beat the winner and the runner-up while the other beat players from the bottom half. The first has large products and the second small ones, so the first ranks ahead. A draw with the top finisher is worth half of that finisher's score, and a loss is worth nothing however strong the opponent was.
FIDE's tie-break regulations define SB exactly this way and offer a Cut-1 version that leaves out the contribution from the lowest-scoring opponent. SB can be used in round robins, where Buchholz is not allowed, and team events use extended forms that combine match points and game points. It needs the opponents' final scores, so it is known only when the event is over. Read tiebreak, buchholz and round robin to compare them.
A neighboring idea is 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.
Rating and title terms like "Sonneborn-Berger" matter once you know your next step, and the improvement plans by rating band set out a weekly routine for each rating range.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 9.1, 13.2 and 14.1, read Oct 21, 2026.
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