Five wins, three draws, one loss in a nine-round open. That is 5 + 1½ = 6½ out of 9, and it is usually a prize. A draw is half a point, a win is one, a loss is zero, and the arithmetic has worked that way for as long as tournaments have been scored.
On the crosstable it appears as ½ in the round column, and the result is written ½-½ rather than 1-0 or 0-1. Nothing else about the game changes: it counts as a game played, it is rated, and it goes into your record like any other.
Where the half points get interesting
Two players finish on 6½ in a nine-round Swiss and only one trophy exists. That is what tiebreaks are for, and the common ones all look at the same question from different angles: how hard was your route to that score?
Buchholz adds up your opponents’ final scores, so a player who drew with the field’s leaders finishes above one who drew with the tail. Sonneborn-Berger weights those scores by whether you beat or drew with each opponent. Direct encounter looks at your game against the player you are tied with, and number of wins rewards the one who took fewer draws to get there. What a Swiss tournament is has the pairing side of it.
That last tiebreak is worth reading twice if you like short draws. Two players on the same score are not the same player, and in most systems the one with more wins is treated as the better result.
What a draw does to your rating
Elo does not care about wins and losses as such. It compares your score with the score your rating predicted, and pays you the difference.
Against an opponent rated two hundred points above you, your expected score is about 0.24. A draw scores 0.5, so with the usual development coefficient of 20 you gain about five points. Against an opponent two hundred points below you, the expectation runs the other way and the same draw costs you about five. Against a player on your own rating, a draw moves nothing at all: expected 0.5, scored 0.5. How chess ratings work does the formula properly.
This is the number behind the standard piece of advice: nobody ever climbed out of a rating band by taking early draws with lower-rated players. The maths simply does not pay for it, and breaking a rating plateau starts with that habit.
Events that pay differently
Some organisers dislike draws enough to change the scoring. The football version gives three points for a win and one for a draw, so two draws are worth less than a win and a loss, and playing for the half point stops being attractive.
The other one is armageddon, used to finish knockout matches: White gets more time, Black gets less, and a drawn game counts as a win for Black. Both are attempts at the same thing, and both leave the ordinary rule alone. In every normal game you will ever play, a draw is half a point, and the only real question is whether you should have accepted it.