[WHY]
All title tournaments on OGS are correspondence, that’s fine but for people like me who don’t like 1 year commitments to single games that’s just extremely unattractive.
[WHAT]
I propose we create a new title tournament modelled after the NHK cup - a live tournament with zero main time, 30s per move and 10 periods of 1 minute overtime. I know our current time settings don’t allow for this specific configuration but we can make do with 10 periods of 30s.
The actual NHK group format would also require either a new option or slight bending of the format, but if there’s a will, there’s a way.
[DETAILS]
Of course the devil is always in the details. We might have to split this into Americas/Eurasia divisions, fiddle with group formats, time setting etc, but I’m positive we can make it work.
[BONUS SUGGESTION, UNRELATED TO THE ABOVE]
I would also like to see the introduction of an option to make tournament games unranked. I think it would increase the number of signups and would allow for all the fun of a tournament without the looming specter of precious rating point loss.
Ideally I’d love to see long time control league. Every week pairing of some sort is published and players have a week to agree on time and play the game. And after N rounds the winners are determined. Something like Open Study Room, expect OSR last time I checked isn’t really competitive - you can play lots, you can play few (and in the end those who have more time to play games win). Or something like creators cup?
That works well because people from all time zones can participate and because of all the hassle to set up a game only serious players are going to participate.
Within usual format of OGS live tournaments people from all around the world will have to be at their computers at the same time and in case of quick win do nothing while waiting for next round, plus if number of participants is relatively big it’s going to last very long (even 30s/m). Bottom line: ain’t nobody got time for that!
Thanks for the suggestions. I think a block format as described https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHK_Cup_(Go) is quite doable, considering it would take about 3-6 hours start to finish for the prelims, another afternoon for the final. That’s worked fine for all the KGS tournaments I’ve seen or participated in so it shouldn’t be a problem. Ain’t got time? Don’t sign up. Just like me with all those great corr title tourneys. They’re just different flavors of ‘no time’.
I’m not necessarily against a less automated tournament structure (negotiate game times), just against dragging the whole thing out for months and therefore we’d at least have to require n games per t time and arbitration rules anticipating that some people won’t finish their games in time. Different sets of problems.
However, instead of just a single alternate title tournament, I think we should have a full set of title tournaments, similar to what exists for correspondence. Having a set of live titles, based on a series of games between a title holder and a challenger selected through a qualification tournament, would be more representative of current strong OGS players, would be far more amenable to people who want to watch games between top players, and would let players enter the tournament cycle without committing to years worth of games, compared to their correspondence counterparts.
I’d propose titles following an annual schedule, similar to how titles in Japan work. Each tournament would have a 2 month qualification cycle, followed by a 1 month final. For example, if February is the OGS Judan, December would be the initial qualification round, reducing a large pool of entrants into a final 16. In January, the final 16 would have weekly matches to determine a challenger, with matches coming at the same time on the same day each week. The winner of the January tournament would then play a best-of-5 match with the current title holder over the month of February. Should the current holder be unable to play, the top two qualifiers would play the final against each other, instead.
Having a final scheduled every two months, with alternating start days/times for different titles, would allow the qualification for one cycle to proceed while the finals for the next were going on, without stopping the finalists from entering the next cycle, or the entrants for the next cycle from watching the finals.
Different titles could also be held at different time controls/board sizes. Something like “Meijin” would then mean something like “best blitz 19x19 player” in OGS, rather than all titles being more or less the same.
An interesting idea. And it got me to thinking, because the key sentence for me here is “far more amenable to people who want to watch games between top players”, because currently, the tournaments have zero watchability.
@xhu98 recently told me he would like to do more casting, and he’s probably not the only one. S_Alex expressed interest in @roy7 and me casting live tournaments as well and if we add in the extra exposure on, say, twitch, we’d be giving OGS, we could fill three needs with one deed.
