Hi, I want to organise a 100-player tournament for players of all ranks. I want each player to get a few games at least, and I want the tournament to finish in 15-20 days. Which pairing method and format would be good to complete this tournament within the time frame?
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Hi, welcome to the site!
The appropriate tournament system in that case is Simultaneous MacMahon, but it’ll be almost impossible to make such a tournament to end in that period of time.
Correspondence games usually take longer than that. Fastest correspondence games (having a Fischer increment of about 8 to 12 hours for example) take about 25 to 35 days to end, and simultaneous MacMahon format has at least 3 rounds.
Having all this in mind, what would be your further questions? What exactly are you looking to achieve with your tournaments?
Cheers.
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Hi,
Automatic site wide tournaments (AST) have no handicap. With a handicap every participant should have a more or less equal chance of winning. Often double digit kyu players join such a tournament, but don’t show up at all after a few stronger players join the tournament.
Is it possible that OGS organises an AST with a handicap?
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Hi, thanks for your response! I want to organise a tournament to offer a competitive platform that would keep Go players engaged. I suppose pairing by strength would give everyone a fair chance initially. Do correct me if I’m wrong. Which format do you think would finish in the time frame of 15-20 days then- ellimination? What is the double ellimination format? Also, what is the minimum time setting for a correspondence game?
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The minimum time is 4 hours per move, but almost no player will be able to hold the pass.
As mentioned by mlopezviedma, you can expect a single correspondence game to take about 30 days. That’s 1 round. The only tournament type finishing on a single round is Round Robin, but Round Robin is limited to 10 players max.
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@Prabhat_Prakash:
You are correct regarding pairings. You also have the option to make initial pairings of one type and subsequent pairings of another type. I personally like to make subsequent pairings by points, allowing players to move up and down through MacMahon groups.
In the double elimination system, players remain in the tournament until they’ve lost 2 games. The tournament ends when there’s only one player (the winner) remaining.
About time frame, the only tournament format that lasts only one round is Round Robin (meaning all against all), but OGS allows a maximum of 10 players for this format, so I don’t think that suits your purpose.
You can look at the minimum time setting for each time control by looking at the dropdown. In our experience, Fischer looks to be the most suitable time control for correspondence, in which increment is the parameter that mostly determines how much time a game usually take. Minimum is 4 hours, but (again, in our experience) you’ll probably see some timeouts, which disqualifies players from the tournament on OGS automatically.
Although we tried many systems to make correspondence games as fast as possible, maybe there’s more to investigate here, I don’t know.
@Atorrante:
This was discussed back in the day when AST were introduced. We can revisit that if it gets more momentum. For the time being, anyone can organize tournaments with custom settings, including handicap.
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@mlopezviedma I understand. I guess it’ll be best to go with a live tournament. Which is the pairing method that pairs by points? I’d really appreciate if you could tell me about McMohan bars and groups - how does that work?
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Thanks!
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Basically you can change the amount of points that people start with based on ranks. In the bars, 1 rank = either +1 or -1 points. I don’t know the correct order for this though.
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Right. For example, if you setup bars at 3k and 6k, initial points for a 3k or more is 0. For a 4k is -1, for a 5k is -2 and for a 6k and below it’s -3.
Simultaneous MacMahon places players in round robin groups. How players are grouped is determined by the pairing method. When every game is over, that’s a round.
Keep in mind that, because of the round robin mechanism, this format is not supported for live tournaments.
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I would recommend trying a round robin correspondence tournament first. You can see how that works and then take it from there.
Also what board size are you looking to use? Live tournaments seem to have a max participation of about 12-15 for 9x9 and single figures for 19x19. If getting 100 players is important you will need to make it correspondence and it will last more than a month or two most likely, If finishing within a month is important you could go live and accept only a few players will join or go round robin and accept the 10 limit.
You could also look through finished tournaments and see what settings were used, the participation, how long they took and how many were disqualified to get some sense of how these things play out.
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@teapoweredrobot Thanks for the insights! I’m looking to use 9x9. Will keep your pointers in mind 
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Ok, we could’ve started from there. 9x9 games don’t take that long 
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Right 
. I’ll come back to this possibilty. What is the difference between the McMohan and simultaneuos McMohan formats?
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In simple MacMahon you play one game per round. It’s similar to Swiss, but you can adjust initial points with bars, just like simultaneous MM.
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Okay I have no idea what the Swiss format is like 
I’ve not got the difference between simultaneous McMohan and simple McMohan. Do throw some light on that please.
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Swiss format is a one-game-per-round system (therefore suitable for live tourneys) where pairings in each round depend on current tournament points.
Players with similar amount of points are matched up, so each round increases the probability of defining a winner.
This is nice for large amounts of players, because the number of rounds can be made really low. For example, you can easily define a 40-players swiss tournament in about 7 rounds, when on round robin it’d take 39 rounds.
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A bit OT but McMahon reduces the number of rounds needed more right? I suppose I would like to clear that number of rounds needed goes up like : McMahon<Swiss<elimination<round robin
I hope that’s about right!
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You can add juubango to that list: 5 games/player, limited to 2 players in the tournament.
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