The Pool System

Sort:

ichabod801

Apr 2, 2009

The Pool System

This is a new tournament system I've been thinking about. We don't have swiss system tournaments on Chess.com. The large, multiround tournaments we do have already take a long time, and a swiss system would take much longer. So, how could we speed up a swiss system?

We start with N players. We pair them up based on their ratings pretty much like they're paired in the current tournament system. Each pair plays two simultaneous games against each other, each being white in one game and black in another.

Once your games are over, you go into the pairing pool. When a certain percentage of the players in the tournament are in the pairing pool (I'm thinking 33%), The player who's been in the pool the longest gets paired. You take that player and find all his pairable opponents in the pool. Two players are pairable with each other if the difference in their ratings is less than the sum of their rating deviations, and they have yet to play each other in the tournament. You pair the player whose been in the pool the longest against the pairable opponent with the greatest rating difference.

Everyone starts with a score of 1200 in the tournament. At the end of each game, your score changes by the same ammount as your rating changed from that game. So your score is like a rating, but it only takes into account tournament games.

The maximum number of rounds would be the log base two of the number of players. As soon as you have finished that many rounds, you go into the finished pool. Once a certain percentage of players are in the finished pool (again I'm thinking 33%), the final round is declared. Everyone in the pairing pool is paired off as best as possible, and as soon as everyone has finished their games the winner is declared.

Further Thoughts

There is a possibility that the person whose been in the pairing pool the longest has no pairable opponents. Two ideas are to pair them against the player with the closest rating that they haven't played yet, or to keep them in the pool and pair the next player. I'm leaning towards the former. Playing fast is an asset in this tournament, so I wouldn't want to penalize the player who had been in the pool the longest.

I went with pairing against the pairable opponent with the greatest rating difference to make it more like other tournaments. In a swiss tournament you start paired against someone with a much lower or higher rating. As the tournament goes on, you play people closer and closer to your skill level. Theoretically that would happen here as well, with the rating differtial narrowing as you play more of your pairable opponents.

The first round could be paired in the same way as later rounds: greatest difference in pairable ratings. I'm not sure if there's a benefit to that, but perhaps consistency is a benefit. On the other hand, you might run into problems being unable to pair everyone.

I went with the ratings style score for the tournament because it will end with some people not having played the full number of games. With a rating style score you could win without playing the full number of games, if you play well. But it could give you the problem of someone winning all of their games and losing the tournament to someone who didn't. The main source of this problem would be new, but good players whose Chess.com rating hadn't caught up to them yet. Obviously you could up the required # of played games to enter, but I don't think that would eliminate the problem. Another option to get rid of the final round idea, and just let everyone keep playing until they had played out the total number of games. That would still cut down on the time between rounds, but not on the overall length of the tournament. A third option is to assume unplayed games were draws. That could screw you if you got stuck against slow opponents, or even tight games that went into the endgame.

Your Thoughts?

Any ideas to improve this system? Would you be interested in playing in such a tournament? If enough people are interested, I would be willing to set up a group and run one.