Direct Comparison

  Difficulty: Intermediate   Keywords: Tournament

Direct Comparison is a tiebreaker used in go tournaments. It tries to break ties by looking only at results between the tied players, disregarding results against other players not in the tied group. Direct Comparison is the term used by the EGF. The AGA uses the term Face to Face Result in place of Direct Comparison.

The most often used case is for two tied players. If one of these players has beaten the other during the tournament, then they will be considered the winner by tiebreak.

When to use Direct Comparison

Direct Comparison cannot always be used, and is mostly useful in cases of two tied players. It is among the recommended tie breakers of both the AGA and the EGF.

Advantages of Direct Comparison

  • If the case of two tied players, it is a simple tiebreaker that is easily understood by players.
  • It is based solely upon the games between the tied players. (Also a disadvantage)
  • Certain People would once have won a tournament on tiebreak if Direct Comparison had been used. (Also a disadvantage.)

Disadvantages of Direct Comparison

  • It is only applicable for small tied groups, where all players have played all others within the group.
  • In the case of more than two tied players, it is not as simple and often less easily understood by players.
  • It does not consider performance over the whole tournament, instead considering only some of the games that have been played.

See DirectComparison/Discussion.

See also


RobertJasiek: Why does the edit war continue? Whoever edits the more often is right? If you list some advantages here, then list all advantages! Anything else is just partial and therefore misleading.

IanDavis: Robert, your advantages were removed for clear reasons (repeats), if you want them back use the discussion page/ discussion threads. I have left in Velocibi's advantage out of respect (not edit warring). I am simply leaving the page in an informative state. Discussion pages are deprecated anyway aren't they?

RobertJasiek: The "clear reasons" have not been stated in detail; they are unclear to me. If you respect his advantages, then also respect mine. Otherwise you are not being informative but desinformative by hiding some arbitrarily. Even if you want to be informative, there is no need for stating an arbitrary list. Instead one can explain that things are being discussed, why, and which current consensus appears to shine through all the fog.

IanDavis: Whatever. The page is better with some information on it. Discuss in various formats for changes.

Bass: Just a quick bit of disclosure for readers of this page: the abovementioned AGA recommendation begins with these words: "Face to Face Result: At first glance, it seems like this is the logical way to break a tie, but that thinking doesn't stand up to close scrutiny.", and the EGF recommendation is written by Robert Jasiek.

RobertJasiek: The "EGF recommendation" is part of an EGF ruleset. Although its original draft had been written by me, afterwards the EGF Rules Commission agreed on the text, submitted it to the EGF Anual General Meeting, and the latter then adopted the ruleset. So one may as well also say that the definition of direct comparison therein is written by the EGF.

IanDavis: As the part of the EGF ruleset dealing with Direct Comparison is unintelligible I would object to anyone saying I wrote it.:) Don't take my word for it. The author of the Gotha pairing program has implemented two distinct interpretations of Direct Comparison (presumably) because he and the french go mailing list couldn't understand it clearly enough.


This is a copy of the living page "Direct Comparison" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2009 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.
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