Tiebreaker
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In games and sports, a tiebreaker is used to determine a winner from among players or teams that are tied at the end of a contest, or a set of contests.
In some situations, the tiebreaker may consist of another round of play. For example, if contestants are tied at the end of a quiz game, they each might be asked one or more extra questions, and whoever correctly answers the most from that extra set is the winner. In many sports, teams that are tied at the end of a match compete in an additional period of play called "overtime" or "extra time". The extra round may also not follow the regular format, e.g. a tiebreak in tennis or a penalty shootout in football (soccer).
The tiebreaker may also consist of another match. For example, Major League Baseball in North America uses one-game playoffs when teams finish the regular season tied for first place in a division or a wild card spot (provided, that is, that one team will be eliminated by the playoff; if both teams will advance — such as one being the division champion and the other a wild card — then an NFL-style tiebreaker is used).
In some sports and tournaments, the tiebreaker is a statistic that is compared to separate contestants who have the same win-loss record, particularly for the purpose of awarding prizes to the top players. For example, after five rounds of play in a Swiss system tournament, 4th through 7th places are often taken by players who all have a 3-2 record. Often-used tiebreakers are score averages in the individual games played so far in the tournament, opponents' winning percentages, the total number of points scored by the player in the tournament, the total number of points scored by all the player's opponents in the tournament, and so forth.
The Sonneborn-Berger tiebreak statistic is a popular choice of tiebreaker for round-robin tournaments in chess competition. It is computed for each tied player as the sum of the tournament scores of all other players that the subject player has defeated plus half the sum of the tournament scores of all other players with whom the subject player has drawn.
Some competitions, such as the FIFA World Cup, the Euroleague and the National Football League, have a whole set of tiebreaking rules in which a group of statistics between the tied teams are compared, one at a time, to determine the seeding in their respective knockout tournament. In many of these tiebreaking rules, if the teams remain tied after comparing all of these statistics, then the tie is broken at random using a coin toss or a drawing of lots.
Penalties in Football (not American football) usually occur in knock-out Tournaments/cup competitions. After 90 minutes or extra-time(120mins) when 2 teams are level, then each team gets to take 5 Penalties each. If the winner still hasn't been decided after these 10 penalties, the we go into Sudden Death where each team has 1 penalty each to determine the winner.
