I have read in this forum several complaints about how lengthy correspondence tournaments are. It takes years to complete a title tournament.
Others are not complaining but simply giving up, resigning or just not starting the next round, or not registering the next year (my case).
My question: how about implementing a byo yomi system in correspondence games, just like in live games? For example each player would get 50 days on the clock (that’s already a 3 month game, assuming no weekend pause), and then a few hours per move (for example one day for 5 moves).
These time controls, or something similar, are already possible. There are fast correspondence tournaments available for those who want them and there are longer for those that need them. I think it’s appropriate that a title tournament is a lengthy process as it means winning one shows both dedication and strength.
I didnt have the strength only the dedication, that’s the only reason why I am going to take first place in https://online-go.com/tournament/3451. Even though it had many stronger players than me, considering I also started this at around 10kyu. So I have to agree with SanDiego.
Going by today’s rankings, there are only two people in round 1 stronger than you. I wouldn’t consider that a reason to overhaul the system. (not saying it’s perfect, but fluctuating ranks is the nature of correspondence)
@BHydden I find it a good example. 37 players started this tournament, only 5 finished it. “Dedication” has a heavy toll. I am not saying that all players would have completed it if it was shorter, it’s just my personal belief that it would have helped a lot.
That’s very likely true, but the problem is (as has been widely discussed) the people, not the timing system chosen.
There are people who like to play slow. Every time the topic of “hey, we should have tighter rules on tournament timing” comes up, these people point out that it would rule them out.
Fair enough too.
There are tournies with fast timing, so people who want to see a result can play those. If they become more popular, we can run more of them, and they can be “the main thing”.
I am actually one of those players who like to play slow.
What I am seeing - and maybe I should have started the thread there: in a tournament round with a hundred players and a few hundred games, most games are completed within a couple months. But then there’s a couple games that take forever. Sometimes those games are not even close, and one of the players could have resigned already.
What I am advocating is a system that works for the majority, as opposed to today’s system where the extra-slow dictate the pace.
IIRC current timesettings for site generated tournaments were decided by voting, so are in line what majority of users wanted.
I do agree that they have ay too big drop-off rate, but that’s mostly because they have so quick timelimits. All it takes is few messed-up days and you timeout & disqualify from the whole tournament. can happen quite often during 3 years what the tournametn lasts
Maybe we have another poll about those sometime in the future, it could be interesting to see if opinions have changed?
That^ only applies to sitewide, autimatically ran tournaments. OGS gives great support for us users to create out own tournaments, even the link above was a tournament made by individual user in custom group. Pretty much all of the currently open correspondence tourneys are like that, and choosing rules, handicaps, timesettings are choises of the tournament director.
So if you want to have a a tournement with using specific timelimits, just pick some group that lets you make tournaments under it, or create your own group for your special thing and advertise it for us! You have all the power in the world to create us new tournaments for playing and having fun!
Make one! This sounds more like canadian system than byo-yomi, try it out! I really hope you can make it work!
( note: don’t use under 24h normal byo-yomi, its almost guaranteed timeout-factory cuz players are all around the world)
I’m actually on one byo-yomi tournament with that kinda timesettings, it’s been running almost 3 years, we are at round 6/9, and have 6/40 players still remaining, can’t really say that using byo-yomi have been making it faster… :<
I think one small feature that needs to be implemented is the ability to order the games by the average remaining time per move. (For byo-yomi, it can be an estimation based on an assumption of the total moves.)
For example, if you have one game with 10 days/10 moves Canadian byo-yomi, and currently it has 6 remaining Days / 9 remaining moves, it should be more urgent than a game with 1 day/move Fischer with 5 remaining days. Unfortunately currently the ordering just takes the remaining time into account instead of average remaining time per move. In this case, if you have 50 days remaining it’ll be on the bottom of the list, and it’s easy to be skipped by typical correspondence players - and when they finally realize it they might already run low on time.
Generally I like the idea of speeding up the correspondence tournaments - but 7 days + 1day/move was the tradition and previous attempts to adjust it seemed to get negative feedbacks by dedicated players who are used to the old settings (and the aforementioned inconvenience is one of the major reasons since different time settings mixing up makes it hard to keep track of the most urgent games). Therefore, if I have extra time, I might try to create a new title with certain fast settings (not guaranteed), but feel free to start experimenting with it to see how many players are interested and what’s the drop-out rate, etc.