Resigning without making any moves should result in disqualification

[KAOSkonfused]

Well, to get back on topic:

@yebellz

On the other hand, players that immediately resign are actively choosing to not participate in a tournament. It’s essentially throwing games and denying their opponents the opportunity to play a game. I think people sign up for tournaments in order to find players that will take the game seriously. It’s disappointing to be paired with an opponent that does not show up or refuses to play.

Yes, I think the same, and I assume that is what the thread starter had in mind.
Players who resign games right away but don’t drop out of the tournament can be a nuisance for their opponents. Just when I think of the “Through The Years” tournament, the statistics show a number of people who obviously don’t want to play and resigned, but they are still in the tournament and will get new games in the next round - and will probably resign again or timeout.

[ayaros]

@S_Alexander

In a tournament resigning without making any moves should result in disqualification.

You should consider that there are several options possible for such behavior: Just some:

1. you are 27k and have been paired with a 5d. Being not a teaching game but a tournament, this can be discouraging for someone.
2. you have just received a notice that it is expected for you hard times in coming hours/days (job, personal issues, …) and you decide to renounce to that game.
3. you simply are disappointed for something (another game lost in a bad way) and for reaction or frustration click suddenly on resigning without thinking too much.
4. your wife entered in your room and blamed you because you are always playing Go instead to prepare the barbecue as she is asking for a while… you got nervous and… “click” - resign.

there are a lot of possible reasons… disqualification seems to be a reaction too much penalizing.

[shinuito]

Maybe it’d be better to filter the argument by time and format (unless you feel the same about all formats).

In blitz/live tournaments, unless it’s a Swiss/McMahon/round robin system, resigning (or timeout) will lead to a loss which could be sufficient to knock you out anyway. It seems in multi-round tournaments in some cases a player resigning could be them not interesting in playing anymore but it’s also possible they just want to sit out a round - naturally they might not be a candidate for winning if they do this in some cases, but like in over the board tournaments you’d think it could be an option. Maybe something like the McMahon system probably shouldn’t allow people to sit out, I’m just imagining some kind of unbalanced tournament where the strongest player sits out rounds and sill wins. I feel like timeout in blitz and live could be looked as a legitimate losing criteria maybe after x moves are played.

In correspondence, it still doesn’t seem unreasonable to want to sit out a multi round tournament, especially if you have multiple other ongoing games. Timeouts and things there though could be a way though to potentially shorten tournaments by eliminating players.

[meili_yinhua]

I think there’s a crucial mistake being made about the nature of McMahon:
The handicap section of a Mcmahon is usually not a competition of players trying to win the tournament, but rather test their skills in a more serious environment. Many times there is an “upper bar” for McMahon, which determines a group of people who have all the same score (despite rank) like a swiss, and those people might be trying to win it all. If you want to remove the idea of a person in a McMahon sitting out and winning, think also on this: that same player could probably throw all their games and win. Of course, in such a situation, you would hope you set an upper bar so that this can’t happen.

But I’d argue the issue is being matched with players who don’t really want to play, hence while the disqualification of players is likely reasonable, it would be preferable to see this go up with the presence of the aforementioned “pause participation” feature so that people can deal with pressing issues and temporarily leave the tournament without resigning and players don’t get matched with people who knew they would have business to attend to for a couple rounds time, but didn’t resign the tournament because they intended to return at later rounds.