So when people sign up for a tournament they may have no idea who they get paired against. In a correspondence tournament you can get paired up with 5-6 people with 5+ stones each.
As we all know, handicap stones nullify opening theory knowledge for the stronger player, but they make up for it in deeper reading abilities. Well this is nullified in correspondence tournaments where people can click ‘analyze’ and play variations to come up with responses way beyond their reading abilities.
At the end of a tournament a strong player can be hit with half of a dozen ranked losses, where if it were a live game he would have stood a fighting chance to win all of those games.
I propose that correspondence tournament games of 4 or more stones handicap be unranked, since it really doesn’t properly measure either player’s ability relative to each other.
I think those are mostly the reasons OGS has 4 ranks now.
However, I think the problem with your request is the special case (if tournament + correspondence + handicap + 4 stones difference), which would lead to confusion. It were probably easier just to make unranked tournaments.
But those are just my thougts, feature requests usually go to [uservoice][1].
[1]:https://ogs.uservoice.com
Hmm, if you are right, the implication is not that the games should be unranked, but that the handicap simply does not scale up linearly. This is an issue that will not be solved by tournment settings.
Yeah I hear ya, the handicap system wasn’t meant for correspondence games like this for sure.
In the meantime I wonder if any analytics can be run on white’s win/loss ratios for 4 or more stone handicap correspondence games from say 10k and stronger. I’d wager white wins significantly less than 50 percent. I could be wrong, but pretty sure it’d be simple to verify.
If it did turn out that white historically only has a 30% win ratio across the server for 4+ stone correspondence games, then I think it’d be worth exploring making tournament games unranked with that many stones since you’re not actively choosing to play 5-6 of those games and just kind of have to ride it out.
I think it’d also encourage more stronger players to join tournaments knowing that they can still have fun playing against major handicaps and not have their rank suffer.
If you worry about stuff like that when joining handicap corr. tournaments, maybe you should just stop it and join/create tournaments without handicaps…?
Few points i’d like to have some more info:
If i’m disqualified from tournament because one timeout, why should i keep playing some 6 stone game if i could just resign without losing any ranks?
If white can’t gain or lose any rating, how about the black player? So if i’m 9k now and win against 4k, i don’t get any rating points from it? Would it be better to discard Elo rating system and give black some points without taking any from white, or something else? Personally i belive that in a long run this kinda stuff would result in many weirdnesses and disturbances in the ranks.
Isn’t the whole idea of handicaps to even out the odds if the players ranks are too far apart?
“people can click ‘analyze’ and play variations to come up with responses way beyond their reading abilities” - So what? This is not only for weaker player, stronger player can also take his time reading though multiple variations and play stronger move than he would play while playing blitz game 10s/move.