The first round is either drawn at random or seeded according to some prior order, such as rating (in chess) or recent performance. All participants then proceed to the next round in which winners are pitted against winners, losers are pitted against losers and so on. In subsequent rounds, each competitor faces an opponent with the same, or almost the same, cumulative score. No competitor is paired with the same opponent twice. In chess, the pairing rules also try to ensure that each player plays an equal or nearly equal number of games with white and black, alternate colors in each round being the most preferable, and a particular effort is made not to assign a player the same color three times consecutively.