Six Nations format explained: five rounds and no knockout

The last Saturday of a Six Nations has three matches on it, staggered so that one finishes as the next begins, and no final. Nobody lifts a trophy after beating a rival in a knockout tie. The championship is won by a team that may already have finished playing, sitting in a changing room in a different country, watching a scoreboard.

That is unusual now. Almost every major competition in world sport has rebuilt its format around a climactic single match, because a climactic single match is what television buys and what sponsors understand. The Six Nations has looked at that and declined, repeatedly, for as long as the option has existed.

The absence is the point. Get the Six Nations format explained properly and you find a competition that has decided its five rounds are the product, that a fixture in round two matters exactly as much as a fixture in round five, and that the price of never having a showpiece final is worth paying for never having a dead rubber either.

Here is how it actually works, from the round robin outwards.

The Six Nations format explained: one round robin and nothing after it

Six teams. England, France, Ireland, Italy, Scotland and Wales. Each plays the other five once. That is fifteen matches, arranged into five rounds of three, and when the fifteenth is finished the table is final.

There is no group stage, because six teams in one group is the whole tournament. There is no seeding, because everybody plays everybody. There is no play-off for the title and no play-off to stay in the competition. Four match points for a win, two for a draw, nothing for a defeat, plus the bonus points dealt with below, and the highest total wins.

The only structural asymmetry is the venue. Five matches cannot be split evenly, so in any given year three teams play three at home and two away, and the other three do the reverse. That flips the following year. Over any two consecutive championships every side has played every other side once at home and once away, which is the mechanism that keeps a fixed fixture list from quietly favouring anyone.

It is worth being precise about what that asymmetry costs, because it is not nothing. A team with three home fixtures in a year has a genuinely easier championship than the same team with two, and the difference does not wash out inside a single season. It washes out over two. A side that wins the title in a three-home year and finishes third in a two-home year has not necessarily got worse.

• 6Teams in the championship
• 5Matches each team plays
• 15Matches in the full championship
• 3Bonus points awarded for a Grand Slam

All four are fixed by the competition rules rather than by any season's results.

The fixture pattern also has a quirk that shapes how a championship feels. Because each round is three matches and there are six teams, every team plays in every round. Nobody has a bye. In a competition with an odd number of teams, or an uneven group structure, somebody is always sitting out and the table is always provisional. Here it is never provisional. After every round, the table is a complete and honest statement of where all six sides stand.

That single property is why the Six Nations table is readable in a way that a football group table often is not, and it is a large part of why the competition has never needed a knockout stage to produce tension.

Why the calendar is a design decision, not an accident

The championship opens on the first weekend of February and finishes in the middle of March. That window is not arbitrary and it is not owned by the Six Nations alone.

World Rugby's player release regulation defines a northern hemisphere release period beginning on the first weekend of February and running for seven weeks. Inside it, clubs are obliged to release selected players to their national unions. Outside it, they are not. The championship is therefore built to fit a regulatory window, and the window is the reason the tournament cannot simply expand to eight rounds because it would be more lucrative.

Within those seven weeks the organisers have one real lever: where the rest weekends go. Historically the championship used two, breaking the five rounds into a rhythm that gave players recovery time and gave the tournament a longer run on television. The 2026 edition compressed that, running three rounds, a single rest week, then the final two, which shortened the whole competition and changed the physical demand on squads without changing a single rule.

The same edition produced two firsts that tell you how hard the calendar is now being worked. The championship opened on a Thursday night in Paris, moved off its traditional Friday or Saturday slot to avoid colliding with the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics, and Dublin staged the competition's first Friday night fixture. Neither changes the format. Both show a competition treating its five rounds as inventory to be placed rather than as a fixed weekend ritual.

The final round is the exception that everyone recognises. All three matches are played on the same day with staggered kick-offs, so that each result lands on the table before the next match finishes. This is the closest the Six Nations gets to a final, and it is a scheduling trick rather than a structural one. It works because the format guarantees that the last round contains three live fixtures rather than one showpiece and two irrelevances.

Consider what a semi-final and final would do to that. Two teams would play a knockout weekend and four would go home. The last round of the group phase would contain matches between sides already qualified and sides already eliminated. The Six Nations has never had a genuinely dead final-day fixture in the sense that a group stage produces them, and adding a knockout is the fastest way to create some.

How Six Nations bonus points work, and the arithmetic underneath them

Until 2017 the championship ran on two points for a win and one for a draw, with no bonus points of any kind. The move to the current system was made to reward attacking rugby, which is the stated reason every competition gives, and it changed the texture of the tournament more than anyone expected.

The current scheme has four components.

Four points for a win. The base currency, and unchanged in relative terms from the old two-point system.

Two points for a draw. Shared equally.

One try bonus point. Awarded to any team scoring four or more tries in a match, regardless of the result. A losing side that scores four tries takes it. So does a drawing side.

One losing bonus point. Awarded to a team that loses by seven points or fewer. Seven is not a random threshold. It is the value of a converted try, so the rule is saying that a team beaten by less than one score was, in the competition's judgement, close enough to deserve something.

A losing team can collect both. Score four tries, lose by five, and you leave with two points, which is the same haul as a draw. That is the design working as intended, and it is also the design at its most contentious.

Then there is the fourth component, which most competitions do not have.

Three bonus points for a Grand Slam. A team that wins all five matches receives three extra points on top of whatever it has already earned.

This looks like a decoration. It is not. It is a structural repair, and the arithmetic shows exactly what it repairs.

Take the maximum a team can score without winning all five. Four wins, each with a try bonus, is five points a time, so twenty. Then one defeat, by seven or fewer, with four tries scored, is two more. The ceiling for a four-win campaign is therefore twenty-two.

Now take the minimum for a Grand Slam. Five wins is twenty match points. If that side scored fewer than four tries in every single match it takes no try bonuses at all, so twenty is its floor before the Grand Slam bonus. Twenty is less than twenty-two.

Without the extra award, a team could win all five matches and finish second to a team that lost one. The championship decided that was an unacceptable outcome and priced the fix precisely: three points takes the Grand Slam floor to twenty-three, which is one clear of the twenty-two ceiling for anybody else.

Grand Slam, no try bonuses, plus the 3-point award23

Four wins with every bonus, one narrow four-try defeat22

Five wins, five try bonuses, plus the 3-point award28

All three figures follow directly from the scoring rules. The first is a Grand Slam with no try bonuses at all, the second is four wins with every available bonus, the third is a perfect campaign.

Show the numbers

Why the Grand Slam bonus had to be exactly three points

Item	Championship points
Grand Slam, no try bonuses, plus the 3-point award	23
Four wins with every bonus, one narrow four-try defeat	22
Five wins, five try bonuses, plus the 3-point award	28

Two points would not have done it. Twenty plus two is twenty-two, which ties rather than clears, and the championship would then have been settled on points difference between a side that won everything and a side that did not. Three is the smallest number that makes a Grand Slam mathematically decisive. That is a rare thing in sports administration: a rule where you can see the reasoning in the value chosen.

The objection to bonus points that has never been answered

Here is the case against, stated properly rather than dismissed.

Bonus points make it possible for a team to finish above a team that beat it. Not through some exotic sequence of results, but routinely, and the mechanism is simple. A side that loses narrowly and scores tries banks points for losing. A side that wins tightly and grinds banks four and nothing else.

An invented example, with round numbers chosen so the sums are easy to follow. Call them Team A and Team B.

Team A wins three matches, all of them by a single score with three tries or fewer, and loses two heavily. Twelve points, no bonuses of any kind. Team B wins two matches with four tries in each, and loses three, all three inside seven points and all three with four tries scored. That is ten match points, two try bonuses from the wins, and six more from the defeats: three try bonuses and three losing bonuses. Eighteen.

Team B finishes six points clear of Team A. And in this invented championship, Team A beat Team B.

• Match points
• Bonus points

Team A, three wins and two heavy defeats120

Team B, two wins and three narrow four-try defeats108

A constructed example, not a real championship. Team A wins three tight low-scoring games and loses two badly. Team B wins two with four tries, and loses three narrowly while scoring four tries each time. Team A won the head-to-head.

Show the numbers

Invented worked example: how a team finishes above a side that beat it

Item	Match points	Bonus points
Team A, three wins and two heavy defeats	12	0
Team B, two wins and three narrow four-try defeats	10	8

Whether that is a fault depends entirely on what you think a league table is measuring. If it is a ranking of who beat whom, Team B being above Team A is nonsense. If it is a reward system designed to make every side chase tries in every match including ones they are losing, Team B has done more of what the competition asked and is correctly placed.

The second reading is the honest one, and the competition should probably say so more plainly than it does. Bonus points are not a more accurate measurement of quality. They are an incentive, deliberately introduced to change behaviour in the eightieth minute of a match that is already lost, and they work. A team eight points down with five minutes left has a reason to keep the ball in hand rather than kick for touch and accept the defeat. That reason did not exist before 2017.

What the system does not do is protect head-to-head results, and the reason is the tiebreakers. The same design that generates the objection also refuses to fix it. Rugby's approach to how bonus points are used across the sport is remarkably consistent about this: the table rewards what you did, not who you did it to.

The tiebreakers, in the order they are applied

Two teams level on points at the end of the championship are separated in a defined sequence, and the sequence is short.

First, points difference. Total points scored across all five matches, minus total points conceded. Not tries, not results, the raw scoreboard aggregate.

Second, tries scored. The count across the whole championship.

Third, nothing. If two sides are level on points, level on points difference and level on tries scored, they are ranked equal. For a championship that means it is shared, not played off.

The thing worth noticing is what is absent. There is no head-to-head tiebreaker. Football's group stages routinely use the result between the tied teams as the first separator, and it feels intuitive: you beat them, you finish above them. The Six Nations does not do this, and has never done it.

The reason is structural rather than philosophical. In a five-match single round robin, points difference is a measurement across the whole competition and head-to-head is a measurement across eighty minutes. Using the eighty minutes to override the whole competition privileges one fixture over the other four for no reason except that it happened to involve the two tied teams. Points difference at least asks the same question of every match.

It also has a side effect that the competition clearly likes. Because points difference is the first separator, the margin of victory matters all the way through the tournament. A team leading by thirty with ten minutes left has a live reason to score again. In a competition where head-to-head came first, that team would be playing out time. This is the same logic as the bonus points, applied to a different lever, and it is why final-day Six Nations matches sometimes turn into scoring exhibitions when the title is at stake.

Shared championships were once common, and before the 1990s a tie on match points simply meant the title was split with no attempt to separate. Points difference as a tiebreaker arrived in 1994, and the practical effect was to make the phrase "shared championship" almost extinct. A dead-level finish on points, points difference and tries is possible. It is not likely.

Three prizes on one table, and only one of them is real

The Six Nations awards its trophy to the team at the top. Sitting alongside that are two further prizes with completely different rules, and the overlap between them confuses more people than any other part of the competition.

The Grand Slam. Won by any team that wins all five of its matches. Available to all six nations. It is not a separate competition, it is a description of a perfect record, and because of the three-point bonus a Grand Slam winner is guaranteed to be champion.

The Triple Crown. Won by any one of England, Ireland, Scotland or Wales that beats the other three in the same championship. This is where the misunderstandings live, so it is worth being blunt about each of them.

It is not a prize for winning the championship. A team can take the Triple Crown and finish second, third or lower, because its matches against France and Italy count for nothing in this particular calculation and everything in the actual table. Beat the three home rivals, lose to France and Italy, and you have a Triple Crown and a mid-table finish.

It is not available to France or Italy. There is no route by which either can win it, no matter how well they play, because the prize predates their involvement and is defined by membership of the four home unions rather than by results. This is not an oversight. It is the surviving trace of a competition that used to have four teams in it.

It cannot be shared, and it cannot be won by two teams in the same year, because beating the other three is only possible for one of the four in any championship. Somebody has to lose those matches.

And it did not exist as a physical object for most of its history. For over a century the Triple Crown was a concept, a phrase used in newspapers and by supporters, with no trophy attached to it at all. An actual trophy was commissioned in the modern sponsorship era, which means a great many of the Triple Crowns in the record books were never presented to anybody.

The wooden spoon. Given to the team that finishes last. Also given to nobody, because it does not exist. There is no wooden spoon in the Six Nations rules, no presentation, and no physical spoon handed over by the organisers. It is a supporters' insult with a very long history and no official standing whatsoever.

It is also frequently confused with a whitewash, which is a different thing. A whitewash is losing all five matches. A wooden spoon is finishing bottom. You can finish bottom with a win, and a side that loses all five is always bottom, because two teams cannot both lose every match in a round robin that pairs them against each other. In practice the whitewash is a subset of the spoon, and the two words are not interchangeable.

Stack the three together and the Six Nations has one prize that is real and awarded, one that is real and awarded but only to four of the six, and one that is entirely imaginary. All three are reported every year as though they carried equal weight.

The seven trophies hiding inside the fixture list

Underneath the championship sits a second layer of silverware, contested inside individual matches and entirely independent of the table.

Fixture	Trophy	Notes
England v Scotland	Calcutta Cup	First contested in 1879, made from melted-down silver rupees, the oldest trophy in the sport
England v Ireland	Millennium Trophy	Created in 1988 to mark the millennium of the city of Dublin
Ireland v Scotland	Centenary Quaich	Contested since 1989, a quaich being a traditional Scottish drinking cup
France v Italy	Giuseppe Garibaldi Trophy	Introduced in 2007, named for a figure claimed by both countries
France v Scotland	Auld Alliance Trophy	Introduced in 2018, commemorating rugby players killed in conflict
Scotland v Wales	Doddie Weir Cup	Introduced in 2018, raising money for motor neurone disease research
Scotland v Italy	Cuttitta Cup	Contested since 2022, named for Massimo Cuttitta

Seven trophies across fifteen fixtures. Look at the left column and something jumps out: Scotland appear in five of the seven, which is every match Scotland play. Alone among the six nations, Scotland cannot take the field in this championship without silverware on the line. Nobody planned that. It is the accumulated result of a hundred and forty years of separate arrangements between separate pairs of unions, and it is a genuinely odd property of the competition.

These trophies matter to the format in a way that sounds sentimental and is actually practical. In a five-round league with no knockout, the competition's structural weakness is the match in round five between two teams who can no longer win anything. The Calcutta Cup fixes that for one fixture. The Cuttitta Cup fixes it for another. A championship without a final has to manufacture reasons for late-season matches to matter, and the tradition of contesting a separate object in each fixture does that work for nearly half the schedule for free.

The rest of the international calendar has almost none of this. The southern hemisphere's own annual tournament runs on a different competitive logic entirely, with fewer teams playing each other twice, and it has never accumulated the same layer of bilateral silverware.

1. 1The fixture patternSix teams, each playing the other five once, fifteen matches in five rounds of three. Home advantage alternates year on year, so a side with three home fixtures this season has two next season.
2. 2Match pointsFour for a win, two for a draw, none for a defeat. Applied identically in every round, with no weighting for opposition or venue.
3. 3Try bonusOne extra point to any team scoring four or more tries in a match, regardless of whether it won, drew or lost.
4. 4Losing bonusOne extra point to any team losing by seven points or fewer, which is the value of a converted try. A losing team can take this and the try bonus in the same match.
5. 5Grand Slam bonusThree further points to a team that wins all five. This lifts the Grand Slam floor to twenty-three, one clear of the twenty-two ceiling for any team that has lost a match.
6. 6First tiebreakerPoints difference across the whole championship, meaning total points scored minus total points conceded. Not tries, not head-to-head, and not the result between the tied teams.
7. 7Second tiebreakerTotal tries scored across all five matches.
8. 8Third tiebreakerThere is none. Teams still level are ranked equal, and a tied championship is shared rather than played off.
9. 9The prizesThe championship trophy to the top of the table. A Grand Slam to anyone winning all five. A Triple Crown to any home union beating the other three. A wooden spoon to whoever finishes bottom, awarded by nobody, because it does not exist.

The full decision procedure, from the fixture pattern to the trophy. Every value shown is set by the competition rules.

From four nations to six, with two championships nobody finished

The competition began in 1883 as the Home Nations Championship: England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, the four unions of what was then one state and is now two. Everything odd about the modern tournament, the Triple Crown included, dates from this period.

France entered in 1910, making it the Five Nations. That arrangement lasted until 1931, when the other unions excluded France over allegations of professionalism in the French club game. France did not return until 1947. That gap is the longest structural interruption in the competition's history other than the two world wars, and it is a reminder that the Six Nations' membership has never been a law of nature.

Italy joined in 2000, making six. The decision was contested at the time and has been contested every year since, generally by people pointing at the results table. It has also been vindicated by almost every measure the unions actually care about, which is the tension at the heart of the expansion argument and the reason the next section exists.

Two championships were never completed, and both are instructive.

In 1972 Wales and Scotland declined to travel to Dublin during the Troubles. Their fixtures against Ireland were not played, the championship was left unfinished, and no title was awarded. The competition had no mechanism for this and did not invent one.

In 2001 an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Britain forced Ireland's remaining fixtures to be postponed. They were played months later, in the autumn, and the championship was completed out of season. That solution worked because a round robin does not care when its matches happen. There is no bracket to hold up and no knockout dates to hit. A tournament with a semi-final and a final could not have absorbed the same disruption anything like as gracefully, which is a genuine and underrated argument for the format.

The points system has changed three times in ways worth knowing. For most of the competition's history a win was worth two points and a draw one. Teams level at the top shared the title outright, which happened often enough that shared championships are scattered through the record books. Points difference arrived as a separator in 1994, and the full bonus point scheme arrived in 2017 alongside a move to four points for a win. A championship table from before 2017 and one from after are not comparable documents, and anybody using historical Six Nations points totals to make a comparison across that boundary is making an error.

Why there is no promotion and relegation, argued honestly on both sides

The six teams are fixed. No side has ever been demoted, no side has ever been promoted, and the bottom team finishes bottom and returns the following February. This is the single most criticised feature of the competition, and both sides of the argument are stronger than their opponents usually admit.

The case for opening it up. Georgia have dominated the second tier of European rugby for years, winning the Rugby Europe Championship repeatedly and by margins that make the competition look like a formality. A sporting structure in which the best team outside the elite has no route in, at any level of performance, is not a sporting structure. It is a cartel with fixtures. The comparison people reach for is football's pyramid, where a club can rise from the bottom to the top on results alone, and the comparison is uncomfortable because the Six Nations has no answer to it that is about rugby.

There is a second argument that gets made less often and is probably stronger. A closed competition removes the consequence of being bad. A union that finishes last knows it will be back next year with the same broadcast income and the same fixtures, and whatever pressure it feels is reputational rather than financial. Relegation is not primarily a punishment. It is a mechanism that converts poor performance into consequences, and a competition without it has to generate those consequences some other way or do without them.

The case for keeping it closed. Every union in the championship builds its entire financial model on five guaranteed February and March fixtures. Broadcast contracts are sold on the certainty of who is playing. Sponsors buy against a fixed six-team competition. Player contracts, stadium debt, professional club funding and age-grade pathways in all six countries are underwritten by that income, and in the smaller unions the Six Nations is not a revenue stream, it is the revenue.

Relegate one of them and you do not simply move a team down a division. You remove the funding base of an entire national professional structure, in a sport where there is no equivalent of a football parachute payment because there is no competition below with the money to soften the fall. The relegated union would almost certainly not be able to come straight back up, because the squad and the coaching would have gone. That is not a hypothetical fear, it is a reasonable reading of what happens to a professional rugby union that loses its central income.

There is also a harder question that promotion advocates tend to skip. A promoted union inherits the fixtures but not the infrastructure. It would need a professional league, a stadium of the right size, a medical and conditioning setup, and a squad depth capable of five Test matches in seven weeks, and it would need all of that before the first February rather than after it. That is a genuine obstacle and not merely an excuse, even though it is also very convenient for the incumbents.

The direction of travel is now visible, and it does not run through the Six Nations. Rugby's new global structure sits in the July and November windows rather than the February and March one, and the announced intention is that a second division and a promotion pathway will attach to that competition rather than to this one. The Six Nations would keep its six teams and its window. Ambitious unions would get a route upward somewhere else in the calendar.

Whether that is a genuine solution or an elegant way of never answering the question depends on how much the second tier is eventually worth, and nobody can know that yet. What can be said is that it is the first time the sport has proposed a mechanism rather than a debate. The way the World Cup handles qualification has always shown that rugby is perfectly capable of running open competition when it wants to. The Six Nations has simply never wanted to.

The women's championship and the age-grade tournaments

The Six Nations is not one competition. The name covers a family of them, run by the same organisation under the same rules.

The Women's Six Nations uses an identical format: six teams, five rounds, one round robin, the same four points for a win, the same try and losing bonuses, the same three-point Grand Slam award. Grand Slams, Triple Crowns and the championship title all exist on the same terms.

What differs is the window. The women's championship does not sit inside February and March alongside the men's tournament. It occupies its own slot later in the spring, and that separation is deliberate. Sharing a window would mean sharing broadcast slots, stadium availability and press attention with a competition that has a century of head start, and every time the two have overlapped the smaller one has lost. Standing alone means the women's championship gets its own Super Saturday, its own final round and its own front pages.

The evidence that this was the right call keeps arriving in the form of attendance figures, which the unions publish and which have repeatedly reset national records for women's rugby in several of the six countries. Standalone fixtures at senior national stadiums, rather than as curtain-raisers attached to men's matches, have become normal rather than exceptional.

The men's Under-20 Six Nations runs concurrently with the senior tournament, with the age-grade fixture generally played the evening before the senior one between the same two nations. It uses the same format and the same points system. Its function is developmental rather than commercial, and it is the most reliable place to watch the players who will be in senior squads within three or four years.

There is also a women's age-grade series, which is newer, has changed both its name and its age band since being introduced, and runs as a short summer tournament at a single host venue rather than as a home-and-away round robin. It is the least settled part of the family and the most likely to change again.

The through-line is that the format itself has proved portable. Six teams, five rounds, no knockout, bonus points, points difference as the separator. It has been applied to a senior men's competition, a senior women's competition and an age-grade competition without modification, which suggests the structure is doing something right independent of the teams inside it.

What private investment bought, and what it did not

The commercial side of the championship is run through a separate company owned by the six unions, and a private equity firm holds a minority stake in it. The deal was significant enough that the UK competition regulator examined it and published a decision, which is the most reliable public account of what the arrangement involves.

The shape of these deals is consistent across sport. The investor pays the existing owners a sum up front, which the unions receive as cash and can spend immediately on debt, facilities or their domestic game. In exchange the investor takes a permanent share of future commercial revenue, principally broadcast and sponsorship income. The unions have converted a portion of their future earnings into money they can use now.

Whether that is good or bad depends on a question nobody can answer for another decade: does the investor's expertise grow the pie by more than the slice it takes? If commercial revenue rises steeply because the competition is packaged and sold better than six national unions could manage between them, everyone gains. If it does not, the unions have sold part of their inheritance to fix a cash flow problem.

What the investment demonstrably has done is change how the calendar is treated. The compressed schedule, the Thursday night opener, the Friday night fixture, the willingness to move matches off their traditional slots: all of it is the behaviour of an organisation optimising broadcast inventory rather than preserving ritual. The five-round structure has not been touched. Everything around it has.

That distinction is the thing to watch. Format changes require six unions to agree, and six unions have never agreed on anything quickly. Scheduling changes require considerably less. Anyone worried about a knockout stage being bolted onto the Six Nations is watching the wrong door.

There is a related pressure that does not come from investors at all. The championship occupies seven weeks in the middle of the club season, and the clubs paying those players' wages have to release them under a regulation they did not write. In France the club body has taken that dispute as far as challenging the regulation itself. In England and the cross-border league that spans Ireland, Wales, Scotland and Italy, the friction is quieter and constant: a club can lose its best players for seven weeks and still be expected to field a competitive side, and the fixtures it plays with a depleted squad count exactly as much as the ones it plays with a full one. The Six Nations is the most valuable thing in northern hemisphere rugby and it is funded, in part, by damage done to the competitions underneath it.

How to read a Six Nations table properly

Four things tell you more than the standings column, and they are all available after any round.

Look at the home and away split first. A team on ten points from three home matches and a team on ten points from three away matches have not achieved the same thing, and next year the two will swap. This is the single most common error in mid-championship analysis.

Separate match points from bonus points. A side on fourteen with fourteen match points has won three and a half games' worth of rugby. A side on fourteen with ten match points and four bonuses has won two and been close in three. Those are different teams with different problems, and the table hides it.

Check the points difference before you check the position. With points difference as the first tiebreaker, a team two points behind with a fifty-point better difference is in a stronger position than the table suggests, and a team level on points with a poor difference needs to win by a margin rather than simply to win.

Work out who can still take a Grand Slam. The moment every team has lost once, the three-point bonus is gone from the tournament, and the maximum available total drops from twenty-eight to twenty-two. That changes the arithmetic of the final round completely, and it is usually the reason a title race that looked settled suddenly is not.

Do that from round two onwards and the last Saturday stops being three separate matches and becomes a single moving calculation across three grounds. Which is, in the end, exactly the thing a final would replace. Every one of the fifteen fixtures is worth the same, every one is scored the same way, and the competition trusts its table to sort them out.

The rest of the rugby explainers here take the same approach, starting with what the rules actually say before asking why they say it, and the companion piece on how points are awarded on the field is the natural next step if the seven-point losing bonus threshold made you wonder where that number came from.