Fast Correspondence Tournaments

[Samraku]

I think someone’s already tried that: it’s called live.

[Atorrante]

This one is in the wrong thread.
It should be in the Go Jokes thread.

[mlopezviedma]

I’m personally very happy that some of you are willing to take over the task of creating tournaments. That gives more variety to choose from. So thank you very much!! Anyhow I’ll keep the classic “RRs for all” given the great participation and relatively successful timeout rate (to me it looks like a good percentage, right?).

That being said, I like the currently running unofficial title tournament a lot. I’ve been thinking about starting this (official?) title tournament format next year:

• Starting on January 1st, with a ~1 month registration period, we’d have a Simul McMahon, just like the current one, but 5 rounds. With a very conservative but relatively good estimation of 2 months per round, we’d have a maximum of 10 months total. 5 rounds also give good opportunity to players that do well but start within the MM bars to climb through some nice amount of groups.
• On November 1st, we’d have a final round: an invitational RR tournament with the 10 highest ranked players from the MM. The winner of this tournament would be the holder of our annual Fast Correspondence Title.

The only thing that worries me is that many of us love fast correspondence, but having to sustain it for a whole year may not be so pleasant. What do y’all think?

[Gia]

If it’s different rounds, it seems like a new thing, so I’d find it exciting.

It annoys me immensely that I accidentally timed out in the unofficial tournament.

Thankfully I haven’t timed out in any of the ones I TD, because that would be embarrassing. :-/

[Gia]

I was thinking how nice it would be to have weekly tournaments, where the time setting would be something like 3 days absolute time, so 3+3+1 day to rest.

But usually I miss something obvious, so I’m putting the idea out here to get it dissected.

[teapoweredrobot]

@mlopezviedma

The only thing that worries me is that many of us love fast correspondence, but having to sustain it for a whole year may not be so pleasant. What do y’all think?

Is the problem more likely to be moderation for the year? It seems to me that a few vacations/pauses which are not picked up quickly could throw out the whole timetable. I guess people play throughout the year but the burden of administering dirt all that time might be greater?

If someone/a team would be willing to commit to this

[mlopezviedma]

@teapoweredrobot

Is the problem more likely to be moderation for the year?

Nah, users immediately have PMed me to call them out, I don’t have a problem with being the whole year taking care of PMing vacationers to ask them politely to speed up the pace and disqualify them if they don’t.

[Atorrante]

@Samraku

I think someone’s already tried that: it’s called live.

Better be called: slow life.

[mlopezviedma]

@Gia

3 days absolute time

Interesting! The only thing I’m not sure is how many people would sign in.

Ugh, I just checked out. The maximum absolute time is 7 days.

[Gia]

@mlopezviedma

The maximum absolute time is 7 days.

Maybe 2 tournaments a month, then?

I’ll make one for next Monday, RR, to see how it goes. Although I really liked the “weekly” theme.

[mlopezviedma]

Hi all! After all this time I haven’t really seen real good use of conditional moves on our fast tournaments, and I’m wondering how important is the “live feeling” that results from disabling analysis for most of you. So, here’s a little poll that can help me decide how to move on:

• I prefer analysis disabled in fast tournaments
• I prefer analysis enabled, mostly because I use it
• I prefer analysis enabled, mostly because of conditional moves

[Lys]

I like to have analysis disabled in my profile, so I can’t use Conditional moves anyway.

[hopser]

With analysis enabled the training for better reading gets disabled.
For obviouse josekis I like to use conditional moves. But sometimes these show up misread moves, why I prefer not to use these functionalities.

[gojac]

It’s mostly for end-game exchanges that I find conditional moves most useful - lets me deal with each set of moves as “one move”, thereby also making wrapping up the end-game less boring.

But I’m not playing Fast Correspondence at this moment.

[mlopezviedma]

I think it’s a great moment for us to add an Official Title Tournament starting from 2021.
However, I don’t want to go ahead and run it without knowing your general preferences, so let me throw a little survey your way. First of all:

Do you think we should have an Official Title Tournament once a year?

• Yes!
• Nah.

About time settings, we use 2 days maximum on our classical RRs, and 3 days maximum on the current unofficial title tournament. So,

What’s the maximum time you think that suits best in this case?

• 2 days max.
• 3 days max.

Would you prefer to have analysis enabled or disabled in this case?

• Enabled.
• Disabled.

How do you think the title holder should be defined?

• Just the winner of this tournament is fine.
• An additional RR between the first 10 players.
• A 3 or 5 games match between the first two players.

[teapoweredrobot]

@mlopezviedma

Do you think we should have an Official Title Tournament once a year?

Would we expect it to finish within the year?

@mlopezviedma

How do you think the title holder should be defined?

I voted for an extra RR but wanted to say only if both would likely fit within the year. Otherwise just the tourney is fine.

[CitrusRootWeevil]

@S_Alexander

You can calculate everyone’s speed in one tournament no problem.

+4 hr/move can be too slow for fast players. Some people have average speed of hour or less.

I like the idea of eliminating players by speed because it’s painless for everyone. Restrictive time settings force some games to time out which is a bad result. But when you eliminate players after the tournament by not inviting them to a new one, it’s all good. Most likely they don’t even know about the next tournament.

I’m late to the party here, but wanted to note: Sometimes things happen and people who are usually not slow time out. I’ve played a ton of games with no timeouts but sadly timed out in the unofficial title because my phone spontaneously stopped notifying for pending timeouts over a weekend when I wasn’t at my normal computer and just keeping up on my phone.

I’d hate to be excluded from anything for that. I’m otherwise reliable I think even if I could probably stand to improve speed a bit.

[Aurell]

I’m a bit surprised, that the majority right now would like to have the analysis (and therefore conditional moves) function disabled.

If someone really wants to use the analysis function, he can still set up a analysis-sgf file on his pc. So, you can’t really ban it anyways.

If you just want to train your won reading, you can simply not use the analysis function.

But most importantly: This is the fast correspondence group and the single best way to speed up a correspondence game are conditional moves. You can go through a joseki (and many other situations) in minutes instead of days.

So, it seems really counterintuitive to disable conditional moves in our title tournament.

[mlopezviedma]

@teapoweredrobot

Would we expect it to finish within the year?

Yes! I think it’s very doable with current settings. I have another concern that is related to this:

@mlopezviedma

The only thing that worries me is that many of us love fast correspondence, but having to sustain it for a whole year may not be so pleasant.

That’s why I wanted to know if you all are okay with participating in a tournament like this, thus the first question of the survey.

@Aurell We’ve been discussing this in the unofficial tournament chat. In practice conditional moves aren’t really used as much as we would like. That’s also why I did that previous poll.

[Aurell]

Well, we will see how it pans out - right now “enabled” seem to be favoured in the last poll.

I’m very much for a fast correspondence title, but I will have to give it a pass, should we play without analysis/conditional moves.