A draw or tie occurs in a competitive sport when the results are identical or inconclusive. Ties or draws are possible in some, but not all, sports and games. Such an outcome, sometimes referred to as deadlock, can also occur in other areas of life such as politics, business, and wherever there are different factions regarding an issue.
Terminology The word tie is usually used in North America, whereas the word draw is usual elsewhere.
Resolving ties or draws In instances where a winner must be determined, several methods are commonly used. Across various sports:
Some other measure may be used, such as aggregate point difference. A game may continue on in extra time. To ensure a quick result, some form of sudden death rule may apply. In some sports, a penalty shootout or bowl-out may occur. A rematch may occur at a later date, especially if a winner must be selected (in a final). The result might be decided by chance (e.g. a toss of a coin) when no objective method of determining a result remains.
The rules governing the resolution of drawn matches are rarely uniform across an entire sport, and are usually specified by the rules of the competition.
Politics
In other areas, such as in a vote, there may be a method to break the tie. Having an odd number of voters is one solution—after the election of the Doge of Venice by a committee of 40 was deadlocked in a tie, the number of electors was increased to 41—but may not always be successful, for example, if a member is absent or abstains, or if there are more than two candidates. In many cases one member of an assembly may by convention not normally vote, but will exercise a casting vote in case of deadlock. Sometimes some method of random choice, such as tossing a coin, may be resorted to, even in a formal vote.Guardian newspaper:Police Federation chooses new chair with a coin toss, 23 May 2014. . Example of random tie-breaking: the leader of the Police Federation of England and Wales was determined by a coin toss, after a tied vote.
In some legislative bodies, a casting vote can only be exercised according to strict rules or constitutional conventions. For example, the Speaker of the British House of Commons (a position whose functions and conventions of operation inspire similar roles in several other nations using the Westminster system) is expected by convention to follow Speaker Denison's rule (i.e. to vote to allow further discussion, if this is possible, and otherwise to vote in favour of the status quo). This in effect means "Yes/Yea/Aye" on the first and second reading of a bill, "No/Nay" on the third, "Yes/Yea/Aye" on the government's budget, and "No/Nay" on a motion of no confidence.
Examples of two-player games
Chess
Chess has five ways of ending or achieving a draw from an opponent: stalemate, agreement between the players, the fifty-move rule (and its extension, seventy-five-move rule), threefold repetition (and its extension, fivefold repetition), or neither player having sufficient material to checkmate. At top-level play, roughly half of games end in a draw.
Boxing When a match ends with completion of the specified maximum number of rounds, and the judges of the match have awarded an equal number of points to both boxers, or if there are three judges (as is the custom) and one judge awards the fight to one fighter, another awards the fight to the opposing fighter, and the third scores it a draw (split draw), the match is declared a draw. The contest would be scored a draw even if two of three judges score it a draw and the third does not (a majority draw). Draws are relatively rare in boxing: certain scoring systems make it impossible for a judge to award equal points for a match. If a championship bout ends in a draw, the champion usually retains the title.
If there is a draw in a quarterfinal or a semifinal match of a tournament, a tiebreaker round is played instead.
Sumo In professional sumo, draws were once common place but are no longer used in any situation. In situations that would have resulted in draws (such as close results, exhaustion, or injury) are currently resolved with immediate rematches, temporary breaks, or forfeiture.
Tennis In most professional tennis matches, a tiebreaker rule applies in each set to avoid lengthy matches, as happens quite frequently if the traditional tennis rule for winning a set is followed. When players reach a score of 6–all in a set, instead of continuing the set until one opponent wins with a two-game difference, a special game is played to decide the winner of the set; the winner is the first to reach at least seven points with a difference of two over the opponent. This however did not apply to the final set of matches at the French Open, allowing the total number of games in a match to be virtually unlimited (for example, the final set of the Isner–Mahut match at the 2010 Wimbledon Championships ended only when John Isner beat Nicolas Mahut 70–68). The Australian Open and Wimbledon Championships did not use a final set tiebreaker through the 2018 tournaments, but began to use a tiebreaker from 2019 (For Wimbledon, the final set tiebreaker occurred after 24 games in the final set, from 2019 to 2021).
Since 2022, all Grand Slam tournaments, including the Olympics in 2024, now use 10-point final set tiebreaker games, with a 2-point lead minimum. If the tiebreaker game deciding the match is tied at 9-all, the first to take a 2-point lead will win.
Video games In versus-fighting games, a draw occurs when both players end the match through a double KO; or via time over, with the same percentage of life bar. For example, some of these games, such as Street Fighter and Tekken, require two rounds to win the match, and if after a third round the score ends in a 1–1 draw, the players have to fight again in an extra round. If this extra round ends in a draw, the game will end for both players. In Mortal Kombat, if a round ends when the time runs out and both players have complete life bars, the game ends for both players, because due to Mortal Kombats gameplay (in which every common hit takes block damage) it is virtually impossible for a round to end tied, and that means the players were not playing for real. In the Super Smash Bros. series, if two or more players have equal lives or points at the end of a match, a sudden death period begins with each fighter having 300% damage, essentially making it so a single hit can win the match. This is also true in Virtua Fighter series and X-Men: Children of the Atom. In SNK vs. Capcom: The Match of the Millennium, a draw awards the round to both sides but favours the CPU if it's a decider i.e. the player is still the loser and must restart the stage even though they technically tied.
Examples of multi-player games
American football Tied games, which were commonplace in the National Football League (NFL) through the 1960s, had become exceedingly rare with the introduction of sudden death overtime, which first applied to the regular season in 1974. The first game this new rule applied to ended in a tie between the Denver Broncos and Pittsburgh Steelers.
However, modifications to overtime rules within the past ten years have actually made ties somewhat more common. The most recent NFL tied game occurred on September 28, 2025, when a game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Green Bay Packers ended in a 40-all tie after overtime, with the Packers scoring a game-tying field goal after failing on a last-play attempt to score a touchdown when the clock was stopped with one second remaining.
In the NFL, as of 2025, both teams are required to have at least one possession in overtime in both regular season and postseason games: in the regular season games, the game ends in a tie if the score is still tied after the ten-minute overtime has expired. In postseason, they will keep playing 15-minute quarters until a winner is determined.
Prior to 2025, a team could win in overtime with a touchdown on the first possession. If the team having first possession in overtime scored only a field goal, the other team would receive the ball, and could either tie the game with a field goal resulting in continuation of overtime (which then becomes sudden death), or score a touchdown, thereby winning the game. This modified sudden death rule was instituted during the 2010 playoffs and adopted for the 2012 regular season.
If the overtime period ended with the score tied in the regular season, either because both teams scored field goals on their initial possessions and failed to score again or neither team scored throughout the duration of the overtime period, then the game would end in a tie. Tied games are listed as part of a team's official record, counting in the team's winning percentage as half a win and half a loss. A game ending in a scoreless tie has never occurred since the introduction of overtime.
Ties were at one point so rare in the modern league that after Donovan McNabb and other Philadelphia Eagles players said, when the team and the Cincinnati Bengals tied 1313 in 2008, that they did not know that a game could end in a tie, Ben Roethlisberger estimated that 50% of players did not know.
After rookie Najee Harris and other players on both teams admitted in 2021, after the Steelers tied the Detroit Lions 16–16, that they had expected the game to continue, NFL.com wrote that since McNabb, "it seems every time a game ends without a victor, at least one player admits he didn't know it was possible".
In National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) college football, overtime was introduced in 1996, eliminating ties except in the event of severe weather or curfew situations. When a game goes to overtime, each team is given one possession from its opponent's twenty-five-yard line with no game clock, despite the one timeout per period and use of play clock. The team leading after both possessions is declared the winner. If the teams remain tied, the team that started second starts the second overtime. If a team scores a touchdown, it must attempt a two-point conversion. If the teams remain tied after this session, the teams alternate attempting two-point conversions (a single play from the 3 yard line) until the tie is resolved. The unpopularity of ties in American sports is reflected in the saying, "A tie is like kissing your sister." The earliest known use of the phrase was by Navy football coach Eddie Erdelatz after a scoreless tie against Duke in 1953.American Dialect Society listserv message, 26 November 2002. The 1968 Yale vs. Harvard football game ended in a 29–29 tie, but the Harvard Crimson student newspaper famously printed the headline "Harvard Beats Yale 29–29"."Harvard Beats Yale" 6 October 1990: Kansas and Iowa State end their game in a 34–34 tie, giving KU the all-time NCAA Division I-A record for number of tied games with 57. Illinois State holds the Division I-AA record for ties with 66. Since then, NCAA football games have a tie-breaking rule, so only an extenuating circumstances game suspended on account of weather, or a rule change reinstating ties would allow this record to be broken. The 1995/96 school year was the last to feature non-weather curtailed tied games.