Direct encounter

Direct encounter (DE) first asks what happened when the tied players faced one another. The points scored in those encounters are added to create separate standings, effectively a mini-table containing only the tied participants.

If every tied participant played every other one, that mini-table can rank the group. Under the rules of the International Chess Federation (FIDE), if a subset remains tied inside it, the same procedure is reapplied to that subset. If two participants met more than once, the current FIDE rule uses the average score from their games against each other as the contribution to this sum.

In a Swiss tournament, not every tied player will necessarily have met every other one. Current FIDE rules can still resolve some places when a participant would necessarily stand alone above the others in the mini-table regardless of the missing encounter results. Unlike Buchholz, DE uses results among the tied participants themselves rather than the final scores of all their opponents.