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Tournament System Improvement

I noticed the rise of popularity of tournaments on lichess recently.
Maybe, it is time to work on their improvements. What do you think, people?
Let's discuss here your wildest ideas, how lichess developers could improve in this area.

1. First of all - berserkering seems like not very effective strategy. The reward is only 1 point, but it can easily ruin your win streak. The bonus for berserkering should be bigger. Maybe introduce some Berserk Streak as well? If you win 3 berserk games in a row - you achieve +2 extra points. Win 6 games - and you'll get +3 every game.

2. Long tournaments, for serious classical time control chess, that is played more than 1 day. This could be played same way as GMs play their tournaments.

3. Correspondence tournaments, including official yearly one, with a champion every year.

4. Combined variant tournaments - chess variant randomly selected before the game, or one of the players select which he prefer.

5. Time odds tournaments. Higher rated player have less time. 100 points difference - 5% of time, 200 - 10%, 300 - 15%, 400 - 20% (numbers should be adjusted).

6. Theme tournaments, were all play the same opening moves, for example King's gambit or Sicilian Dragon.

7. Team match tournaments - 2 or more teams play a match. For example Kingscrusher fans VS Fins fans. Captains choose players in their team before the start.

8. Suggestion: make last game count too (in bullet only), so that all games, that were started before countdown clock reaches zero, will give points, even if time ended during game. Right now games in progress must be finished, however they don't count for the tournament, which makes last game no sense.

PS - fix a mistake - 30 seconds to 15 seconds in the tournaments description (Other important rules.)

Forget to say - there should be a trophy room in users profile, where you can see how many hourly, monthly, weekly, daily tournaments he won.

Also there should be official daily tournaments for chess variants too.
Thoughts on the points made in post #1:

1. That is an intentional design decision. Winning takes precedence over playing with a time handicap. We did not want to unbalance the system to favour berserkers. You should be able to win a tournament without berserking, and that is what is happening now.

2. Verrrry wild idea, especially for online chess. :) I would not expect this anytime soon if ever. In the meantime, you can use http://challonge.com/ with a dedicated group of players.

3. Official ones? No, they would be almost impossible to moderate for cheaters. As for correspondence tournaments, same as the above, the incentive is very low because online chess between strangers does not entice a lot of commitment on either player's part. People drop out all the time even in 1 hour blitz tournaments (wherein you are also expected to commit to playing to the end), so it would be even worse for correspondence.

4. Novel idea. There is something like this for simuls, where the players choose what to play against the host. Though honestly, I think it would be infuriating for players who don't get the variant they want. If it's non-random, then it would be against the spirit of the tournament, as it implies a certain degree of authority on the tournament-creator's part, while tournaments are expected to be an open and non-exclusive affair.

5. Time-handicapped matches take precedence... this would honestly make for a terrible tournament format, as it decreases the incentive to compete. Sounds neither fun nor competitive.

6. Already a planned feature. :) The best idea of the lot in my opinion.

7. Has also been considered, though the Teams feature needs serious improvement first.

8. Don't know why you started this one with 'Suggestion' because these are all suggestions. Anyway... I think this is a neat idea. It may cause a bit of a spectacle towards the end if the top players are battling it out, or something like that. At the same time, the decisive, time-critical nature of the current system is also quite cool. I think it's worth a try, and if it doesn't work out, the change can be reverted.

On post #2:

An 'achievement' system has been thought up for a while, and the idea is to be much more expansive than just tournament victories.

Not sure about official dailies for chess variants. It takes some of the prestige away from the 'official' moniker (official tournaments are advertised much more actively around the site than user-created tournaments). One for Chess960 might be welcome, but then again, players might find the random aspect of 960 quite unfair.

Either way, the rationale for this feature is quite minimal in my opinion (as anyone can create a tournament), and the tournament list is already far too saturated with official tournaments. What Lichess really needs is more user-created tournaments and less official stuff. They should be differentiated by parameters, like a rating control, so to give them more flavour. It would be much nicer to leave it up to the community instead of forcing some kind of authorial model like that -- and it would feel more 'lichessy' as well.
I would add:
9) Tournaments restricted by glitko rating, i.e. let the creator of the tournament decide the glitko range of the allowed players.

I'm in favor of 6) and 8), if that means anything to you.

2) and 3) look interesting as well to me. We cannot avoid cheaters. That does not mean we must give up with that format because of a bunch of few idiots.
Thanks a lot for programmers up to now they are doing a great job for starters. someone was talking in kingscrusher stream i am quoting from him that there could be tournaments in which players start down material. for example both players start down one knight or strong players start down a rook against a much weaker opponent. i think i saw this on chesscube but it wasn't much detailed.

2) you talked about theme positions tournament. i would like to add something to that. Could there be tournaments where the starting position is figured by the tournament creater? It could be from a certain known middlegame position from an opening or an endgame or even wilder non-theoretical ones. I think it would be fun:)
Maybe for combined variant tournaments they could run along similar lines to multi-game poker tournaments (like HORSE and HOSE). For instance a 3 0 tournament which is 50 minutes long could be divided into five 10 minute segments of Standard, KOTH, Atomic, 360, Horde (SKATH!). It would be up to you then to 'sit out' variants if you wanted to.
I also think they should have on demand quad tournaments and on demand round robin. Once one fills up, a new one starts.
I think hourly tournaments should be replaced with rolling tournament: it starts if there are 30 players (maybe or if 10 people voted for an early start). While one tournament is in play you can join next one (or daily/weekly if it's less than one more tournament duration). When the tournament is finished next one is immediately created and waiting for players.

This way you can play couple of tournaments without interruption. And there will be no need in creating own tournament with same settings as built-in, splitting number of players and strength too (see Kingscrusher's stream).
Tournaments with restricted rating and the possibility to create tournaments for more than 7 mins. I cant participate in the hourly blitz arena because there are players too strong for me, so it will be a good idea to create a sub 1500 blitz and classical tournaments.
Why not put tournaments on alternately between on the hour and on the half hour? Then you don't have to be free at the same time always to get in at the start of a tournament.

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