BAP Scoring in Chess: Definition, Points and Examples

BAP scoring is the Ballard Anti-Draw Point system, a way of scoring chess games in which the points depend on the colour a player had. A win with Black earns 3 points, a win with White earns 2, a draw with Black earns 1, and a draw with White or any loss earns nothing.

How the points work

The unusual entry is the draw with White. It is worth exactly what a loss is worth, so a player with the first move cannot bank half a point by trading into a quiet ending. Black, who is traditionally the side that is content with a draw, still gets a point for it. Over a whole game, a decisive result hands out more points to the pair than a draw does: 2 or 3 against 1.

Take a player who has White in round one and draws, then has Black in round two and draws again. Under the usual one-half-point rule that is a score of 1. Under BAP it is 1, but only because the second draw was with Black, and a White player who made two draws would finish on zero.

Where it comes from

The system was developed by Clint Ballard, who is described as a chess enthusiast and the president of a software company. It was first used at the Bainbridge Slugfest tournament in 2006. The aim is in the name: it was designed to discourage short or agreed draws.

Related scoring ideas

The best-known alternative is 3-1-0 scoring, in which a win is worth 3, a draw 1 and a loss 0. FIFA adopted it for football in 1994, and in chess it was used at the Lippstadt tournament in 2003 and at Bilbao in 2008. It treats both colours alike, which is the main difference from BAP. A different approach bans agreed draws, as at Sofia in 2005. The full article on BAP scoring in chess compares these systems, and draw by agreement explains the underlying rule. The wider story of rules and champions is on the chess history page.

The point table

Result	White player	Black player
Win	2	3
Draw	0	1
Loss	0	0

Read across a single game, the table makes a decisive result worth 2 or 3 points in total to the two players, while a draw is worth 1. That gap is the whole mechanism. A player who expects only a draw has less to gain from it than under the half-point rule, and one who plays for a win with Black is paid the most.

A worked example

Suppose a player has White in rounds one and three and Black in round two. In round one a draw is agreed, in round two a draw is agreed, and in round three White wins. Under the half-point rule the score is 2. Under 3-1-0 it is 5, because the two draws are worth 1 each and the win 3. Under BAP it is 3: nothing for the White draw, 1 for the Black draw and 2 for the White win. The same three games therefore rank differently depending on the system, and a tournament table can reorder when it is rescored. A player who draws every game with Black finishes well ahead of one who draws every game with White, who scores nothing at all.

The BAP calculator on the full article scores a list of games under all three systems side by side.

Why the colour matters

White starts a move ahead, so a draw with White is arguably a slightly weaker result than a draw with Black. Larry Kaufman made the opposite point against 3-1-0: the first-move advantage is not large enough to force a win, so Black should not be punished for drawing. BAP answers that by paying Black for a draw while paying White nothing. Critics of the equal 3-1-0 table also pointed out that it can invite team cheating in open events, since throwing games is easier to justify when a win earns so much.

The aim, in the inventor’s words

Clint Ballard named the system after himself and gave a commercial reason for it. He said that the usual flurry of last-round draws in almost all tournaments makes chess unmarketable on television. The first event to use it was the 2006 Bainbridge Slugfest.

Older and newer scoring experiments

Draws have never had one fixed value. At Paris in 1867 draws were ignored, which in effect treated them as double losses. The Dundee tournament of the same year introduced the half point that is now standard. A proposal at the 1964 FIDE Congress by a Puerto Rican delegate would have paid 4 points for a win, 2 for a draw, 1 for a lost game and 0 for a forfeit. It was not adopted.

More recent proposals leave the draw alone and change what counts as one. Ed Epp suggested scoring draws between 0.4 and 0.6 to offset White’s advantage. Lasker and Capablanca argued that stalemate should be worth more than an ordinary draw, three quarters of a point to the side giving it and one quarter to the stalemated side. Kaufman and Arno Nickel proposed the same three-quarter split for stalemate and a bare king, with threefold repetition worth a quarter. In engine-played trials of World Championship conditions, that combination was reported to lower the draw rate from 65.6 percent to 22.6 percent.

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