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Tournament modes (besides Arena) #1998

Closed galuel closed 4 years ago

galuel commented 8 years ago

When creating a new tournament : https://fr.lichess.org/tournament/new

We cannot choose the king of tourney, in fact the kind of tourney by default is "Arena", but it exists in chess the most popular one swiss tournament, closed tournament, and also elimination. It should be very good to show the possibility to expand the kind of tourney we could play with a list-box :

Unihedro commented 8 years ago

Swiss tournaments were once introduced, during the change introducing a modular (as far as I'm concerned) structure to enable different tournament modes to be made. However,

  1. Arena tournaments remained superior. It pairs people fast and effectively, enabled berserking which gave a method for strong players to generate a lead in time, and enables tournament strategies which aren't present otherwise.
  2. Not enough users used Swiss tournaments to justify their presence. Also, they are slow and the RSVP format doesn't work well for online chess.
  3. Also, Swiss tournaments were used in small circles only, so naturally they had a popularity restriction.
  4. having idling modes sit around with less than 5 tournaments made a day is a waste of maintenance time and storage blah blah blah

A lot of tournament structures that make people wait falls short for the same reason as point 2. A lot of tournament structures that generate an arbitrary result does not surpass arena tournaments and doesn't need to be there as per point 1.

The bottom line is that we don't really need other formats right now as far as I see it. Realistically, even with these new modes in place, Arena tournaments will still serve 100% of all official tournaments and possibly over 90% of all user-created ones.

Also, brackets can be organized with an external service, such as the Lichess4545 league generating swiss tournament rounds, and using challonge (a webservice) to generate elimination tournament pairings.

galuel commented 8 years ago

Very good Challonge ! I didn't know that, I'll check it, thank you ! http://challonge.com

billymoon commented 7 years ago

I also wanted to organise a chess tournament, so got all involved to get lichess accounts. I then used challonge for tournament tree, which is all great. The only awkward part, is explaining to people how to organise themselves, and challenge each other, especially as most people did not already have accounts. What would be great, is if I could crate a game for people to play. Rather than specifically inviting users, I think it would work well if I could create a game with two unique urls, one for player one, and one for player two. I could then email/slack/skype/carrier pideon them to the players, and manage my tournament outside of lichess using challonge/post-it-notes/etc... If games could be created by api, then the whole loop could be closed, with challonge (which also has an excellent api) handling the tournament bracket, lichess managing chess, and my own app managing integration, updating winner on challonge automatically when games complete, and notifying users etc...

This is very similar to when I challenge a friend, and get a one time url - but it would just have to generate a url for each player, and indicate what the game id would be.

It also means you can invite people to play each other who don't yet have accounts, because they can create an account, then click the magic url to access the game.

lichess already exceeds all my expectations, but I think this feature would make it practically perfect in almost every way.

mliebelt commented 4 years ago

I am trying to have my school chess working group organized on lichess (which is mostly great). The one thing that does not work at all for us is tournament. Here is why:

Therefore, round robin would be much nicer for them. All play the same number of games, again all other children, and they can use the waiting time to watch the other games (as they did in real life in the past).

We once tried to pair the children individually, so imitating a round robin tournament, but failed. The simple reason here was, that the children are not able to pair each other, because they are no experienced computer users, some cannot read, and there are no parents around the whole time to help time.

I checked yesterday the lichess API (https://lichess.org/api#operation/challengeCreate) if there is a way to create challenges for them, but no way to do that either. I had hoped that the new school class feature helps me organize tournaments among the children, but no way to have a tournament amongst them.

So I don't follow the argument that other tournament kinds have no value for the players. Some of them are a better fit depending on the circumstances.

ornicar commented 4 years ago

I fixed arena pairings for small tournaments

mliebelt commented 4 years ago

Wow, so I will give it a try again with my group of childs. Great, thank you a lot. I will comment on this comment again if I find something unusual. Thank you a lot, lichess is great!

tmmlaarhoven commented 4 years ago

Swiss tournaments were once introduced, during the change introducing a modular (as far as I'm concerned) structure to enable different tournament modes to be made. However,

1. Arena tournaments remained superior. It pairs people fast and effectively, enabled berserking which gave a method for strong players to generate a lead in time, and enables tournament strategies which aren't present otherwise.

2. Not enough users used Swiss tournaments to justify their presence. Also, they are slow and the RSVP format doesn't work well for online chess.

3. Also, Swiss tournaments were used in small circles only, so naturally they had a popularity restriction.

4. having idling modes sit around with less than 5 tournaments made a day is a waste of maintenance time and storage blah blah blah

A lot of tournament structures that make people wait falls short for the same reason as point 2. A lot of tournament structures that generate an arbitrary result does not surpass arena tournaments and doesn't need to be there as per point 1.

The bottom line is that we don't really need other formats right now as far as I see it. Realistically, even with these new modes in place, Arena tournaments will still serve 100% of all official tournaments and possibly over 90% of all user-created ones.

Also, brackets can be organized with an external service, such as the Lichess4545 league generating swiss tournament rounds, and using challonge (a webservice) to generate elimination tournament pairings.

As discussed in the forum (https://lichess.org/forum/lichess-feedback/swiss-tournaments-5), I think a lot has changed since 4 years ago, when this comment was posted. Although I believe these arguments were valid then, especially now that clubs are quarantined and looking to host online events for their local chess club (and are often both more familiar with swiss/round robins, and are not annoyed by having to wait a few minutes for everyone to finish), having alternative formats to arenas would be a big plus. I know many chess clubs which have opted for the evil competitor now, mostly for the ability to easily continue such swiss formats in an online setting there.

So yeah: I understand that maybe it would be a lot of work to get this swiss format reinstated on lichess properly, and I would agree that in many cases arena formats are still nicer to use, but having the ability to host swiss tournaments on lichess would definitely make a difference to some people and clubs now. (More so than when this topic was originally raised.)

mliebelt commented 4 years ago

Just a short notice, our last tournament with 10 kids went much better. No more long waiting times, most of the times, all were playing except 2-3 (if they were paired before). So the kids had fun, and I will do those tournaments again. Great work, great support!!

tmmlaarhoven commented 4 years ago

Just posting some ideas here: what are the thoughts on KO formats now? Could it make for an interesting alternative format for, say, the titled arenas?

Some motivating factors: first of all, it's always good to have some variety. Some people might prefer 1+0 and some prefer 3+0, but having different options never hurts. Now also the TAs alternate between 1+0 and 3+0.

For online KO events: a competitor site recently set up elimination matches for the final 8 after a Swiss portion; surely not because chess fans hate the format. There's always more tension in elimination matches, because there's more at stake. Also all the Magnus chess tour events feature mini-matches, rather than simple round robins. If fans didn't like it, maybe they would not have kept the same format for all these events. Judging from the broadcasts, I think the players and the spectators do appreciate this new format of having mini-matches, so that each day there is tension who will win those mini-matches.

As for the common complaint for online tournaments, that waiting times are worse with KO or swiss, I agree. So here's a thought: why not make it a KO format of 1v1 elimination mini-matches, similar to the Magnus tour, but where the players play say 15 minutes of 1+0 games, rather than a fixed number of games. So more like an arena-format for the mini-matches, except that it's 1v1. Maybe even include berserking, so that people can win or come back in the match with a lower score. Naturally at the end the winner advances, and maybe in case of a tie the player with the lower rating advances. With 10 such rounds of 15 minutes, a titled arena could accommodate 1024 players in 2:30h.

Anyway, I'm interested to hear your thoughts.

And I guess more in spirit of the Magnus tour, an alternative idea could be a swiss of mini-matches: just have say 8 rounds of 15mins matches, without elimination, but just pairing up players as in a Swiss event of 8 rounds. The winner of each mini-match scores a point, the loser gets nothing. (Or the scores are assigned percentage-wise based on the match scores or something.) It might sound a bit weird, but who knows, it might be fun.

mliebelt commented 4 years ago

@tmmlaarhoven If you want you idea taken serious, you should file a new ticket, with a good speaking summary. A comment on a closed ticket may not even noticed ...