Stacker News Chess Tournament Update
Looking at the initial post, we have the following list of 14 stackers who expressed interest in a chess tournament:
@ek
@kristapsk
@BitcoinAbhi
@grayruby
@frostdragon
@Taft
@02d43d3798
@030e0dca83
@riberet19
@felipe
@didiplaywell
@SatsMate
@itsTomekK
@wize123
I hope I didn't forget someone.
I received good input that we can discuss in this post to see if everyone is on board (haha, get it?) or if anyone has something to add.
Correspondence games make cheating easier
I would prefer 15+10 rapid or something like that. People could be given some x days of time to arrange time suitable for both to play the match.
-- @kristapsk, #582528
I personally don't like correspondence games, mostly because it's too easy to cheat there (using an engine). Would be happy to play any real-time (e.g. blitz or rapid) time control.
-- @02d43d3798, #582777
Thanks to these inputs, I think we should indeed do 15+10 rapid games.
15+10 means that both sides have 15 minutes and after every turn of yours, 10 seconds are added to your clock. According to my experience, that usually gives enough time to think to not lose due to time pressure but for other reasons. As mentioned, rapid games like that would make cheating less likely and we would receive results faster.
I think I was thinking too complicated when I thought it would be too much to ask for stackers to find a time with their opponent but now I think that should not be a problem.
Maybe we also don't need to find individual times but can actually agree on a time for a (warm-up) tournament? More about this below.
Prize pool attracts cheaters
This would be fun! Not sure about having a prize, though. It would attract cheaters
Ok here’s my thought - I can almost say with certainty that the points will be distributed based on rating. Like, if there’s one person here over 2200, they will likely be undefeated… it’s hard to do a tournament when everyone is rated differently, so it won’t be much of a true competition in that sense.Mhh, that's a very good point. Maybe no sponsored prize pool then (only buy-ins?); at least distribute across top 3 or something or really just for fun with no sats involved.Yeah I'll think through the prize pool thing... money for chess games with anonymous players online is a massive incentive for cheating, and I don't have any great solutions for that off the top of my head...
-- @frostdragon, #583996
I considered to sponsor a prize pool but now I am no longer sure if that's a good idea. I think we should do at least a warm-up tournament first with no buy-in and prize pool:
Warm-up tournament on lichess
How about a warm-up one evening tournament of short (5-15 min) games? On lichess you can customize the tournament
-- @itsTomekK, #583432
I really liked this idea. I think our focus should be to get the ball rolling and thus to keep things really simple. This means no buy-in or prize pool or anything else we might come up with later. Just a simple custom tournament on lichess for now.
Therefore, I looked up how to create tournaments on there. You can create tournaments here:
With the advanced settings, we can set a password to make it SN exclusive and a time for the tournament:
The tournament FAQ had some useful information:
How is the winner decided?The player(s) with the most points at the conclusion of the tournament's set time limit will be announced winner(s).When two or more players have the same number of points, the tournament performance is the tie break.
How does the pairing work?At the beginning of the tournament, players are paired based on their rating.As soon as you finish a game, return to the tournament lobby: you will then be paired with a player close to your ranking. This ensures minimum wait time, however you may not face all other players in the tournament.Play fast and return to the lobby to play more games and win more points.
I suggest following settings:
| Setting | Value |
|---|---|
| Name | Stacker News |
| Rated | yes (???) |
| Variant | Standard |
| Clock initial time | 15 minutes |
| Clock increment | 10 seconds |
| Duration | 90 minutes (???) |
| Time before tournament starts | <overridden by custom start date> |
| Tournament description | <surprise> |
| Starting position | <leave empty to start game from the normal initial position> |
| Tournament entry code | <will be announced on SN> |
| Minimum rated games | no restriction |
| Minimum account age | no restriction |
| Minimum rating | no restriction |
| Maximum weekly rating | no restriction |
| Only allow pre-defined users to join | <leave empty> |
| Allow Berserk | yes (???) |
| Chat room | yes |
| Arena streaks | no (???) |
| Custom start date | sometime this weekend (???) |
I used
??? when I am not sure about the value but would use that if no one has any objections.So what about a tournament this weekend?
As you can see in the table above, I am not sure about some settings. Here are the most important ones:
Custom start date?
Can we find a time on which everyone can participate? We probably need to consider time zones. According to our analytics, most stackers are from the US:
But it's obviously more relevant where the players are from that want to participate. I have no problem with a chess tournament during the European night on the weekend. But I don't know about others.
As a first suggestion, what about
this Saturday, June 29 at 8pm UTC? (timezone converter)I considered making this post a poll but you can only select a single option which doesn't make sense for times imo.
Ranked?
I don't care about ranked or not. Lichess suggests ranked though so they can analyze for engine use (cheating):
Make the games rated. Casual games are not automatically analysed for engine use. Enforcing rated games helps us to enforce fair play.
But as mentioned, I don't really care and I don't think engine use will be a big issue for us. It should be a real casual tournament for fun and building a community around chess on SN.
But what do you think?
Duration?
The winner is determined by the one with the best ranking after the tournament is over. Minimum duration is 20 minutes and maximum duration is 12 hours. If we go with 15+10, I think it's reasonable to assume that a game on average takes 30 minutes (15 minutes per side, ignoring the time increment). This means with ~10 participants, we would need 5 hours of a tournament play so everyone could play against everyone else.
I think nobody here wants to play chess for 5 hours straight, lol (but correct me if I am wrong).
I am thinking more about 1-2 hours. Everyone should be able to get enough games for an accurate ranking so 30 minutes sounds too short. But 2 hours also might be too long.
So maybe 1.5 hours? I don't know. Let me know what you think.
Any other questions or ideas?
Surely nobody noticed that I didn't post an update regarding the chess tournament yesterday as I said I would here.
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