Hi,
I’m new to the site and especially to tournaments. As far as I observed, at most 8-10 players attend a tournament. I wonder if these numbers are typical. Is it a rare occurence to have tournaments with many more players? And if they exist, at which times of the week are the most popular tournaments happening?
I think it depends on which tournaments you’re talking about. The title tournaments group and the Four Seasons Tournament group both have tournaments with a lot of players, though these are mainly correspondence tournaments.
If you’re thinking about live tournaments then I believe these are less well attended.
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What type of tournament are you looking for? If you want to play correspondence games there are a number of groups that have tournaments with a large number of players, for example FTS
I don’t play may live game tournaments, but could understand that those would be more difficult to find larger numbers of players.
Tom
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Thanks for the answers. I am interested in live tournaments. And now I realize that I have considered automatic sitewide tournaments only. Still, it was the correspondence games where the crowd is. I was hoping that, things like big saturday afternoon events is around somewhere.
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Maybe we need to do something to promote the live tournaments.
I’m not sure what day or time should be picked for the target. Once a target is set, we should talk it up and get the mods to run banners for select tournaments on that day.
The largest issue is that, with the frequent cycle, too few folks show for any given instance of a live tournament.
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Well we do run banners for all of our automatically generated tournaments. The correspondence tournaments are wildly popular. I’d certainly love live tournaments to do better and I’m open to suggestions. The challenge is that Go matches are pretty long and committing to a multiple-hour live tournament can be a real challenge for most people. Given that I think I think we do pretty well at it based on our server population. I’m thinking I might switch the hourly tournaments to only be single or double elim. blitz and schedule weekly and monthly live tournaments.
I really like the way lichess runs their tournaments: http://en.lichess.org/tournament
The way theirs work is the tournament goes on for an hour… and in that hour you play as many games as you can and whomever has the most points or quality wins at the end wins. There’s no way we could do that kind of tournament here… one hour just wouldn’t be long enough to get enough good matchups.
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In my opinion, it would be ideal to split live tournaments in many “pieces”, over many days (let’s say, every Saturday or Sunday). Like a league, let’s say.
That way a player doesn’t have to commit many hours to the tourney. And can still enjoy a torunament.
The problem is that I don’t see a way to easily set this up. I mean, is there a way to “automate” matches (and especially time of the matches) over many days?
My idea would be something like:
- you join this kind of tourney, let’s say on Saturday, and it’s a “Swiss modified” kind of tourney (see below). The 1st game is simultaneous for each player;
- after the game is over, you “adjourn” the tourney, asking in some automatic way to each player 2-3 preferred times for the next game;
- an engine sets up next matches according to preferred times and a Swiss-like algorhitm; each player is notified the time of his next match;
- next Saturday each player plays his game at the time it was decided, and the process starts again until the end of the tourney.
I know it’s kinda difficult to implement something like this, but it would be great. And I think that each tourney could easily reach 40-50 players.
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decreasing frequency of live tournaments to weekly is a good option, I think. but it sounds somewhat deconstructive.
maybe some of the live tournaments can be advertised further, for example each day a selected one’s banner will stay troughout the day, and players may enter the tournament in advance. or the same thing for a weekly tournament can be done.
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If you are going to decrease number of those tournaments, please keep in mind that OGS has users from every timezone, so having at least few per day allows everyone to join them.
If it’s only once a day, could that tournament start at 19:00 UTC, that would be the most comfortable starting time for me? 
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The reason we run them every hour is specifically because there are people all over the world. We won’t be decreasing the frequency of the hourly tournaments. We will consider expanding live tournaments to other formats like mentioned above by @ema but it’s a little bit of work to implement those so stay tuned.
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That is good to hear, even if i’m not too active live tournament player, i do enjoy greatly playing at those sometimes 
About expanding those tournaments, can we soon have those blitz 9x9 and live 13x13 tournaments that are listed on https://online-go.com/leaderboards, but not run?
+1 to this suggestion. Would participate.
Perhaps people want to find the bigger tournaments and have a hard time finding out which ones are the biggest.
If you posting some history graph of live tournament start time vs players attending, perhaps people will naturally gravitate toward the size of tournament that they like. People who want bigger ones will follow each other and have a positive feedback loop.
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