Buchholz system

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The Buchholz system is a ranking system in chess developed by Bruno Buchholz in 1932 in order to determinate ranks in a Swiss system tournament where players have the same score. It sums up the score of the players' opponents and thus favors those who have confronted better opponents.

The major criticism of this system is that tie-break scores can be distorted by the set of opponents that each player plays (especially in early rounds). To avoid this problem a version of Buchholz, the Median-Buchholz System is sometimes used. In the Median-Buchholz System the best and worst scores of a player's opponents are discarded, and the remaining scores summed.