Handicap 9x9

[Moognus_Carlsen]

Analysis of a 9x9 handicap tournament

I hosted a Swiss 9x9 correspondence handicap tournament to celebrate the new ranking system in the beginning of 2021, and we finished it up a few days ago. While 9x9 handicap games can often seem ridiculous, and the handicap formula we use doesn’t make much sense, I wanted to know if we could still have a fun tournament and maybe even learn something from the results. In this post I’ll try to show that the answer to both questions is yes. First, some basic statistics: Players: 45 Rounds: 11 …