About custom position, it's more difficult to extract the data. You are correct in saying they are with the standard games, but in proportion they are a really small fraction of them. I used to setup a lot of such matches with 5FF in the past, and I still do with P2K now, but it's less than 10% of the total of the games we create, and the great majority of other teams just don't create such matches.
I could indeed mention size of matches. When I was managing 5FF I tried to increase the size of the match, but the owner didn't want to, and is actually setting up many matches that are below 5 boards, the average used to be closer to 3.8.
There's a small mention about the overall size of matches in the article, and if we go more in detail in 2024 the average match size when my data was gathered is 8.04 boards/match. 5FF has an average of 3.60, P2K 5.29 (but growing as the team is growing too), UCN 6.95 also, and for Tortoise Chess Club as you mention them, 8.56. Their biggest match this year was 48 players when I sampled the data.
In 2024, mid-April, only 37 teams had started a match with 100 boards or more, and those are:
- chess-com-deutsch
- the-great-viking-warriors
- team-usa-southeast
- team-scotland
- los-amigos-de-chanquete
- vit-nam
- bulgaria
- team-poland
- team-of-the-czech-republic
- team-spain
- team-usa
- team-england
- team-iran
- team-ukraine
- team-bulgaria2
- team-slovakia
- team-france
- team-south-africa
- team-denmark
- france-deutschland-group
- up-the-cherries
- chess-com-polska
- team-belgium
- team-romania
- team-armenia
- team-australia
- the-united-chess-nations
- premium-members
- may-the-chess-be-with-you
- promote-to-king
- team-azerbaijan
- team-8
- chess-team-holland
- club-yankee
- bsreosrpsreo
- srbija-tim
- total-960
Many of those are actually league matches.
Thank you very much
I made a small study on which are the most active teams in terms of daily matches, It seems relevant to post it here : https://www.chess.com/blog/Ximoon/an-overview-of-team-matches-from-2008-to-today
Of course it tells nothing about community activities, live or vote chess.
So according to that study, 5 for fighting is the most active club? Cool.
Although I have some criticisms.
-You distinguish between 960 and standard, but don't mention custom positions so I assume they are lumped with standard. In theory, you can make custom positions far more removed from standard than 960 is. Of course in practice, right now custom postions are quite uncommon, and often when they exist they just include a standard opening; but there's no guarantee this will continue.
-You're only counting the number of team matches, not their size. 5 for fighting seem to do exclusively 5-player team matches, that's their gimmick. Meanwhile, as I mentioned, many of the Tortoise Chess Club's matches have over 100 players.