#69
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lichess.org/tournament/bzyJbKRs is an example of a tournament we had last summer, where both 5th and 13th place finishers won all their games. 13th place asked their dad, "what could have I done better to win the tournament"? And he could not answer."
I can. She couldn't have done any better. It's the tournament organizers who where careless enough to chose a time control (10+5) and a tournament duration (1h10m) that only allowed her to play 3 games. That's not enough.
There's no way to rank 38 players with 3 games, with arena, swiss or any system. Time controls and tournament duration must be set properly.
Arena is definitely a threat to the development of new generations of chess players.
As I said in comment #47: TRUE CHESS requires depth and discipline. Arena encourages superficiality and tricks.
Arena is fine as a hobby (no question). But to play chess seriously you need other kinds of tournaments.
Betting for Arena as the only option implies that Lichess is instilling bad habits in the minds of a multitude of chess players. For the sake of chess, this should be corrected.
I do not think Arena is a bad thing at all - it is hyper efficient with many advantages. I would only consider Arena to play for myself. But for any "championship" style tournament which needs to justify the final rankings (both individual and team) in a logical manner, the number of rounds has to be equal for all participants. An optional tweak to allow to "hold up" pairings should take care of it.
While I agree with #71, what do you do if you want, for example, an 8 round 10+5 tournament? If you made an arena for 2.5 hours to get roughly 8 games per player there's still enough variance that some people end up playing 3 or 4 more games than the others.
I didn't read the full thread, but I agree with the general sentiment that Swiss is significantly better than Arena in championship tournaments. In my city chess is very popular, and many people have been organizing tournaments with a great number of players. The experience was great at first, but soon this has all changed and the number of players who were interested have dropped quite a bit. A few common complaints:
1) In Arena, you are rewarded for playing as many games as possible. The player who plays the most games and plays decently well usually wins. Win rate doesn't matter at all. Now this is a problem, because it often happens that in a lost position one opponent may quickly resign, while another will play slowly till checkmate. If a few players are going for the championship, and they face a guy who 'stalls' in this way, his tournament chances are just gone.
2) Tied in to this, it also sometimes happens that a player may somewhat 'unfairly' become champion (or finish at the top). I was observing a tournament in which many strong GMs (including Abdusattorov) played, and somehow a 2100 finished 5th. Why? Because he was facing much weaker opponents on average, and he managed to berserk many games and get a commanding early lead. Later, when he faced some stronger players, he slipped down a bit, but because of the short duration, he had racked up a sufficient number of points to finish quite high. Meanwhile, the GMs were facing quite strong players on average, and finished in dismal positions.
3) Now this is the absolute worst. Many a times in these events various players are quite close to each other at the top. One time in a tournament a player was on 76 points, and the guy chasing him on 73. Around 4-5 mins were left in the tournament. The guy on 73 had a streak, and he also berserked the game. The time control was 3+0. He actually had a completely won position out of the opening, but the other guy just kept on fighting and stalling, and somehow he managed to managed to keep the game going long enough for the tournament clock to reach around 30 secs. At this point, the player on 73 knew he couldn't win the game in such little time - and he had a choice - either offer a draw and confirm second, or try to win in 30 secs. The guy played on, and he won in a minute, but the tournament was already finished and the points didn't count. He ended up finishing fourth.
These are just some of the many complaints that I am aware of many players (including me). For now, it just feels to many people like Arena is just rather unfair for these kind of events. Arena is more fun for sure, but it's not always the most fair.
P.s. Sorry for the extremely long post but I just feel bad because lichess is an amazing website but if things stand like this the tournaments have to be done on buggy
lag.com, as they allow Swiss events.
We played swiss rapid (15+5) tournament in our club once a month. It was 6 rounds and it was even possible with 12 players. Yeah, it might happen that there are players with 2w4b games (and vice versa), but those things might happen in arena too.
Problem "waiting for pairing in round robin/swiss tournament" aka I need to pee problem: this happens in OTB tournaments too. Just get the players some time to start the round (e.g. 15 seconds like in arena (not sure if it's 15 secs)) and then start their clock. In blitz tournament his pee pause can probably wait until the end of the game and in rapid or classic tournament having less minutes on the clock is not that big deal.
In those tournaments it's probably not that hard to implement something like "round n starts after round n-1 is finished, but not before 30 minutes after start of n-1 round" so players who finish quickly knew that they had at least some time for their other activities. There might be even countdown for that with number of games still going (round n starts in 15 minutes 23 seconds and after finishing last x games).
Arena rewards the streak - I'm not completely sure this is a good thing. Let's say we have players A (much stronger, but not the best) and B (weaker). Due to their relative strenghts player A starts with two wins and then loss against highter rated player, so he's not on the top, then two wins (climbing the ladder) and loss again, two wins (climbing the ladder) and loss in the last game, which means he has 12 points from 9 games (+6=0-3). Player B starts with 5 losses (maybe even on purpose) so he's at the bottom with weaker players and then wins his last 4 games against much weaker competition. He has 14 points from 9 games with record (+4=0-5). Is that fair? Hell no.
Arena format has it's flaws, round robin probably not (only problem might be the discipline of the players, but I just assume that if you create or join RR tournament, you knew those players or you're aware of this potential problem) swiss has it's flaws. That's why it would be nice to have the possibility to choose which one of these tournaments you would like to join or create, which one suits you and your clubmates the best.
Yeah, you could use API with those tokens (I don't know what that means). That's for people who have some computer skills. Most of the players are not these people. Most chess clubs are 45 % old men, 45 % kids, 10 % rest. Their only computer skills are browsing web, using chessbase and probably working with same swiss manager (and even that might be problem when something unexpected happens).
It's like with those Huawei phones:
C(ustomer): You don't have google services (play, gmail, etc).
H: Yeah, but you can download apks manually, install it etc.
C: I don't know how to do that.
H: There are tutorials.
S(amsung or whatever): We have google services.
C: okay. Huawei, I loved you, you had great innovations, but I want my phone experience as comfortable as possible, so I'll buy Samsung.
Of course I know that this comparison is not fair, but do you think most of these traditional chess clubs will play those tournaments on lichess using some API which they don't know nothing about or join the dark side, because dark side has cookies and those tournaments they want to play?
Pardon my math, player B has 12 points as well, but you get the point
There is another point (which may have been brought up before), which is that one is too dependent on whoever is available for a game. Sometimes this can be used (pause when a strong player is in the tournament pool), but most of the times this happens purely as a coincidence. Normally, this shouldn't happen in a Swiss format.
E.g.
lichess.org/tournament/DZS09rX9 The top-3 finishers never played against each other. However, the number 1 did play no. 5 and 9 twice, and the no. 8 three times.
@redbullet64 #54 Thanks! Nice to hear your experience as well. And of course, my approach was a bit naive. Now that we have quite some correct tokens, another attempt in the future would fare much smoother, and of course I've learned from it. But it is just like you said, it would be so much easier if the format was in-built.
@CubesAndPi #70 I think we missed out some of our regulars just because of that: they wouldn't give out a token, even if you can limit it yourself and delete afterwards if you want to. But it is an extra barrier.
To remain positive, again it is a great step forward that there now is a team chat. That gives much more depth in communication than all the mail, WhatsApp group and built-in chat on our club site which all reached out to 10-50% of the participants. But a Swiss tournament with its own chat would be even better ;-)
I like the idea of Swiss tournaments where everyone plays the same number of games against similarly ranked opponents so playing better is rewarded more than finishing faster. I like how quick pairings are in Arena tournaments, where there's never any prolonged wait time between rounds due to that one drawn increment game currently being "played out" to move 150. Personally, I think there's room for both formats, but I thought I'd bring up a compromise idea that keeps the faster pairings from Arena but the fixed number of games from Swiss with only a small (I think?) change to the existing code.
Currently, a good way to customize Arena tournaments to de-emphasize cramming in more games is to disable Berserk. With a few more additional rule change options in the "Advanced settings" (optional during tournament creation of course) we could bring the Arena format even closer to a "fairer" Swiss system.
1. The option to disable the streak bonus. This is really useful in the Arena format to discourage quick resigning but isn't needed here (due to #3).
2. The option to pair with each opponent at most once. This will slow the pairings a little bit, but helps spread the top games out among more of the top players.
3. The main change is an option to place a cap on the number of games each player can play in a given tournament. Once you hit the game cap, your score is set in stone. If there's a lot of time left, you can go off and do your own thing while the tournament countdown finishes and come back later to see the results. You can even take a bathroom break right in the middle without worrying about missing out on those two precious extra bullet games that might have pushed you onto the podium!
Tournament creators would still need to set a reasonable length in minutes to give most players enough time to reach the game cap without making it so long that top players can completely miss each other and the game ends in a 10-way tie for first place with everyone on 100%. Done with the proper ratio of tournament length to game cap though, I think you'd have something at least closer to a Swiss tournament without the delay between rounds (unfortunately also without the transparently more fair Swiss pairing rules but what can you do...). As a bonus, in private tournaments this could effectively become a round robin by setting the game cap equal to the number of players minus 1.
