The introduction of swiss and round robin for tournaments on lichess

Greetings @Kwatschewsky!

I support your proposal in the comment #40: it would be great to implement tournaments with the Round Robin system applied exclusively for team events (not qualified).

Separate topic:
I love Lichess! I admire the work done by Mr. Duplessis (@thibault) and the team of developers behind Lichess.

I would like to contribute more with this beautiful project. Unfortunately, I do not have the technical knowledge or financial resources. I don't even have a command of the English language: I use Google Translate. This prevents me from sharing my ideas to the extent and depth I would like.

I think that the greatness of Lichess has its origin in two causes:

1. Lichess is made with love, and this is perceived everywhere.
2. Lichess = DEMOCRACY

This functionality does not need to be built directly into Lichess for you to organize it. Take a look at all the formats that have been created by using the API: www.lichess4545.com/

Greetings, @freefal!

Your suggestion in comment #42 sounds interesting, but I get the impression that executing it requires technical skills that are beyond the reach of most Lichess users. Is that so or am I wrong?

#40
"What would be the risk for lichess?"
Well complaints and dissatisfied players.
It has been done in the past and was abandoned.
Let us assume that lichess reactivates swiss tournament and let us assume on some Sunday a 20 player tournament of 5 rounds with 30+15 time control is scheduled. That means a game typically takes 90 minutes; some more, some less. So the whole tournament will take about 5 hours. Now players A and B play way too fast and A wins after 10 minutes. Let us say players C and D play carefully and get into a rook ending that ends after 90 minutes. So players A and B sit waiting for pairings for 80 minutes. They do not know when the last game will end and pairings will go up. All players sit waiting for pairings. One of these goes to drink a coffee and visits the bathroom. Then pairings go up and this player is not yet back. So he gets a loss. His opponent has been waiting for pairings and now gets a free win without playing and now has to wait for another 90 minutes. The player that got the loss also complains: he sat there waiting and if he goes away for a few minutes he gets an unfair loss.

@tpr You have been present throughout this thread, telling us about how Swiss/RR pairings will cause dissatisfaction. From what I can see, this is what your primary points are:

1. People can organize pairings and games themselves
2. it will take time to decide pairings, due to variable length of games.
3. People may lose due to being away.

But you disregard an important thing- All of these are true for OTB tournaments as well!

1. Of course we can organize tournaments ourselves, but in that vein we could organize arena tournaments ourselves too. Why have lichess offer them, then? Organizing pairings and having players play separately is a simple workaround, but it is tedious, and it is a WORKAROUND. Given the popularity of the 4545 league, it should be obvious that people are interested in such pairing systems.

2. In a swiss I played, there were 3 rounds a day. In the first round of a day, a game went on for 4 hours. Were pairings delayed? Yes. Did people blame the tournament organizers? Of course not! People understand why the delays are caused, and they understand that if they play a long game they themselves might be the cause for the delays. And if they're that bored they can just watch the ongoing games.

3. This is your only valid fear, in my opinion. This also is parried simply. As in OTB tournaments, increase the time limit for making the first move from 15 seconds or 60 seconds or whatever, to a tenth or a quarter of the clock time. This gives you enough time to come back, and if you're away for longer then you lose. And if you counter that the opponent will have to waste that time, the opponent came prepared for some length of time playing a chess game, and he is now winning in a significantly lesser time, and has no cause to complain.

In addition, chess.com conducts swiss tournaments regularly. They have none of those problems which you insist will appear. All of this points to show that most of your fears are unfounded, and I cannot fathom why you would want to stop the introduction of Swiss/RR. In addition, in the almost 50 messages in this thread, you are the only one who has resisted/disagreed with the idea. @thibault and @bufferunderrun suggested playing arena and organising ourselves respectively, while all the rest of the messages except yours have been in agreement. It is clear that the vast majority of the people want Swiss/RR to be introduced.

#45
Over the board tournaments are different: usually a crowd gathers around the one board where they are still playing, paople usually start talking when the last game of a round is finished, which creates some audible noise. Pairings up is usually annopunced loudly and people from the bar and the restrooms rush to the listing of pairings which indicates pairings are released. You could try and emulate this in online with a display of the last game in progress and with a pop up with an audible sound pairings are up, but chances are greater that the finish of the last game and pairings up go unnoticed online.

1. Lichess tournaments have hundreds of players, marathons even thousands. There are several tournaments per hour and that 24/7. You cannot do that yourself. An 8 player round robin or a 20 player swiss is a piece of cake, even manually without a pairing program.

2. I do not predict that it will cause satisfaction, I refer to the fact that it has been implemented in the past and has been abandoned because it caused dissatisfaction.

3. Over the board clocks are started.

@tpr #44
The risk to Lichess is not complaints and unsatisfied players.

The real risk for Lichess is that the large number of players requesting Swiss tournaments and Round Robin will tire of waiting for a solution and start migrating to other platforms that do offer those services.

Tournaments in Arena format are fine for playing bullet and blitz. Arena is about playing as fast as possible to accumulate as many points as possible and in this way obtain victory. In my opinion, this is not quality chess. This is a simple hobby for lazy minds.

TRUE CHESS requires depth and discipline. You only get this with slow-paced games (Classical). For time controls of this kind the Arena system is not as effective. The viable solution is the implementation of the Swiss and Round Robin systems. If even idiots at Chess.com can offer it, why can't Lichess?

I BELIEVE IN LICHESS!!
LONG LIVE LICHESS!!

Last Friday, at our club we tried the manual pairing through the API with challenges set through curl. The idea was to play 6 rounds of rapid, time control 8+1. So every 20min a new round, and after two hours the tournament was finished. At our club site we embedded the games and through the pairing program (Sevilla) I updated the standings on the same page.

Problems: we needed tokens from all participants. This was asked in front, but proved very difficult. Out of 18 players, 6 gave half tokens, tokens with no permissions (the "Create and accept challenges" is necessary), or another error came up. Luckily we thought about testing them before round 1, but to ask everyone to do it again caused delays. The first round was half an hour late, and while most people chatted their time away, one was fed up and left (understandably). After that it went better, but some couldn't find their games. We finished 70min later than planned.
Positives: everyone loved the format. Just play an opponent once in an evening was welcomed. Also, the waiting between the rounds was perfect so one could get a drink, or even play a 3+0 game to kill the time.

Conclusion: the Swiss format was perfect, including the waiting between rounds, but the technical difficulties were a hugh burden. During the past weeks, most members can find regular Arena tournaments at our team page and join. So a Swiss tournament for teams as an built-in option really would be a great addition!

Great to see this topic discussed so heavily! Especially #40 and #48 where very insightful for me.

Please consider that everything can be worked around. Lichess could be a collection of different clock-settings plus a chatroom and players could meet and shout out their moves, regardless of the game (chess, checkers, risk,...) they are playing. But Lichess decided to focus on chess. They found many variations I did not even know existed and implemented them.
When a part of the Lichess playerbase is asking for swiss/round robin (s/rr) they surely can work around, but having plenty of people 'working around' calls for a developer to programm such a workaround and implement it. Then it is no longer a workaround, it is a feature. What the creators of this thread are asking for is the feature of being able to play different tournaments, because they do not want, or can not work around it, so please stop hinting at workarounds.

The problem I have with lacking a s/rr format is not, that its hard to organize outside of lichess. I miss the ease of looking up the current leader, kiebitzing other pairings, or simply being able to have a chat with all participants. Working around with outside organisation requires me to play the game on lichess, announce parings/results in another chat, and spectate the tournament through following the participants and having their profile opened. This are at least three browsertabs to be open. Lichess showed with arena that they were able to solve this issue.

I can understand, Lichess is not a fan of s/rr and therefore do not want to implement it, so I offer you an alternative:
Implement a 'Tournament Room'. People can join and the 'tournament leader' has to set pairings and start the rounds manually. Then players can organize their swiss, round robin, alphabetical matches, whatever on their own.
I would love to see such a room in the easy-accesible and lean design lichess stands for!

Small thought about the 'being implemented before but people did not like it':

In the beginning of lichess, the players where mostly 'casual' chessplayers that have never seen a club or a organized chess event before. They just came to Lichess to play chess online in the easiest way possible. It was not just the classical chessplayers, it included the lovers of all variants (threecheck, crazyhouse,...). Its not hard to understand, this playerbase did not want a slow complicated tournamentformat like swiss. They just wanted to play a whole bunch of chessgames. Arena is perfect for that. I have to admit, Arena still is great to throw in this 1-2 hour session of non-stop chessgames and it is a great unique way to compete.
With Lichess' sucess came the more serious playerbase and lastly even titled players. This playerbase is used to complicated tiebrakes and more the complex pairing structure of swiss. Now with Corona being present even more 'established' clubplayers join lichess and miss their so loved tournaments.
I am sure the present Lichessplayerbase would gracefully accept the implementation of the mentioned formats.