Sitewide Tournaments

Greetings, OGS people! We are starting to reorganize Sitewide Tournaments for all of you to join freely. In this post you have all the info you’ll need about them, and it’s going to be updated if needed.


###Tournaments Rules

  • All Tournaments are without handicap and, of course, open.
  • All Tournaments follow Japanese rules.
  • All Correspondence Tournaments have analysis enabled.
  • All Live Tournaments have analysis disabled.
  • All Tournaments exclude provisional players.
  • All Mac Mahon Tournaments have no rank restrictions and have bars at 1k and 10k.
  • All Correspondence Tournaments have the following time control: 2 days + 1 day per move Fischer increment with a maximum of 2 days.

Note: Every time a board size isn’t mentioned, 19x19 is asumed.


###Correspondence Tournaments

They will start as soon as the maximum number of players is reached.

  • Simultaneous Mac Mahon: three tournaments, for 19x19, 13x13 and 9x9.
  • Round Robin: three tournaments, each one restricted to Dans, SDKs and DDKs.

###Live Tournaments

They are going to be all Swiss until other types are added to the system. The schedules are going to be posted here as comments.

  • 5 rounds, 10m+5x30s Byoyomi: three tournaments, each one restricted to Dans, SDKs and DDKs.
  • 5 rounds, 7m+10s Fischer, max 7m, 13x13: three tournaments, each one restricted to Dans, SDKs and DDKs.
  • 5 rounds, 5m+10s Fischer, max 5m, 9x9: three tournaments, each one restricted to Dans, SDKs and DDKs.

For more information, read the Live Tournaments FAQ.

4 Likes

It’s very nice to see that the sitewide tournaments get their attention.

Here is my opinion and some question on the proposition:

Correspondence tournaments: 2 days maximum is extremely short. I won’t be able to keep up this pace, especially when juggling two tournaments with 12 games or so. And given the frequent time-outs we already have I won’t be the only one. Very often, correspondance games turn out to be long blitz games with a fair share of blunders. Please don’t make it even more so. Have the time maximum at least at 5. Or 7 and drop the weekend-stop. Or leave it as is. I’ve only seen people complaining about the long maximum time who didn’t play in these tournaments. The 200+ people who play in them are OK with them. Or then speak up here, especially if you’re not a DDK. I happily stand corrected.

Why the reduction of the 7 or so tournaments to only 2 (per player and size)? I’m sure there is demand for more sitewide tournaments. Also I see no problem of keeping them basically running the way they are.

And what’s wrong with elimination or league? I don’t see a point abandoning them (well, the league has already been abolished with the merge. But I still miss it, and I think I’m not the only one).

How does a round robin tournament look like when there are more than 10 players? Or more than 50? Do you really mean that everybody has to play everybody in his bracket?

Hurray for conditional moves and analysis enabled!

Looking forward to the sitewide tournaments.

I really like the new upcomming tournaments, especially the live ones! Stay tuned for more information getting announced soon. :blush:

24 moves/day is too much to keep up with?

Or … is it that a 2 day absence is all too likely. I guess I agree with that, and it’s not a good reason to lose a game. I’d go for 7 day max, keeping the +1 day in Fischer time.

We agreed that a big maximum time make correspondence games eternal, making therefore the tournament eternal. Sum to that the fact that Simultaneous Mac Mahon has more than one round, so a tournament can run for months. When joining a tournament, we think someone has to be responsible in not making other players wait for your game to end.

3 Likes

So… anyone gonna actually play in this? http://online-go.com/tournament/3024 I’m the only one there :smile:

How do we find these tournaments?

I gave a direct link to one above. But the normal way is “Tournaments” in the main menu on the left side (click the button in the upper left if the menu is not shown). Looks like right now for sitewide, only 2 correspondence tournaments are actually open, no live tournies.

Live tournaments will be scheduled here. We’ll start them in August.

Whatever the max time is set to, you still have to average one day per move to avoid eventually depleting your clock. However, if games truly took one day per move, they would easily last the better part of a year, if not longer. Fischer games with a one day increment usually go much faster simply because people aren’t stretching out their time to the limits and are instead spilling time by maxing out. Setting the shorter max time just causes more spillage which reduces the length and frequency of absences of longer than one day, but that also has the drawback of not being able to bank up more time for short unofficial vactions.

Basically, a game with a 3 day max could take just as long as a game with a 7 day max. Maybe using the lower max has a practical effect of shortening games through higher spillage rates for people not stretching out their clock, but it comes with the drawback of shorter unofficial breaks in play.

How exactly do live tournaments work? Does each one have a fixed schedule for all of their games for players to be able to determine their availability? I was looking at some of the live tournaments currently being offered, but I couldn’t figure out where to find the scheduling info.

Did the max time for ladder games also get adjusted down to 3 days instead of 7?

Hi yebellz,

the exact starting times of each live tournament will be announced in the tournament info and here, in the forums. We plan on typically starting these tournaments on Saturdays and Sundays, and we will be switching timezones every few weeks. Just stay tuned for more information. :smiley:

When the live tournament starts, you have to be online, of course. :slight_smile:

1 Like

Ladder games were indeed reduced to 3 days from 7 days. Some ladder games could be stretched out to a crazy long time… I don’t think 3 days is unreasonable.

This is where that decision was made:

2 Likes

@ba_yu note that these are different than title tournaments of which there are rounds ongoing. These are more one-off site-wide tournaments run by OGS administrators. You are obviously not required to join them (or join all of them) if you feel like you can’t keep up with the time controls. Note that there will be plenty of tournaments of all different shapes, sizes, and time controls.

Pretty much we’ve been dropping the default maximum move times across the board for site-run correspondence tournaments to 3 days max as we feel that some tournaments are just taking too long. Some of the title tournaments are taking more than 2 years! This really hurts participation and attrition from those tournaments is incredibly high.

Most of the rest of your comment seems to confuse sitewide tournaments with title tournaments. Round Robin tournaments will have no more than 10 players so multiple sitewide tournaments will be created if necessary to satisfy the number of people wanting to participate.

3 Likes

Yeah! live tournaments :smiley: been looking forward to that.

2 Likes

A 3d+1d game with a 3 day max can last just as long as a 3d+1d game with a 7 day max.

Decreasing the max does not enforce a reduction on the average time per move. It simply decreases the flexibility afforded to players to occasionally take a couple of days off from play without having to use the vacation system.

There seem to be two different issues that some players might have with the previous 3d+1d/7max settings:

  1. They don’t like that the overall game may take a very long time (potentially many months, if not the better part of a year).
  2. They don’t like that a player may occasionally disappear for up to a week.
    It is important not to confuse these two.

Reducing the max from 7 days to 3 days, addresses the second issue, but does little to address the first. Personally, I don’t really find the second issue to be a problem. For a player to even disappear for several days during their turn, they first have to bank up that time by playing faster than the one day average. Also, they can’t do this too often, since they need to replenish their clock by playing faster than average for several moves. The only way reducing the max from 7 days to 3 days minorly affects the first issue is in the case of players that frequently max out and “slip” time, but those players must already be averaging faster than the one day per move. Hence, this is change that only has a minor affect of making the faster correspondence games slightly faster.

If you want to actually ensure that ladder games finish quicker overall, I would recommend reducing the increment (possibly to something in the range of +12 hours to +18 hours) rather than the max.

I think that 3d+16hrs with a 5 day max might strike a nice balance. Bringing the increment down by a third will definitely reduce the average game length by about a third. Reducing the max slightly addresses those who take issue with the second item (listed above), but still gives some flexibility to players to bank up time to take short breaks.

So, we’re going to stick with what we have now. Many experiments have been run on tournaments in the last 6 months that does, in practice, show that tournaments complete much faster.

It could be that in practice, many players in correspondence games are already moving much faster than one day per move and staying maxed out for much of the game (perhaps this is especially the case for tournaments). Hence, the change will make those games move faster, by forcing players to have fewer and/or shorter lulls between the periods of faster play. However, without decreasing the increment, there is nothing to actually force players to average any faster than one move per day, which would lead to a very long game.

My point is that the change might make the faster correspondence players go a bit faster on average, but it doesn’t actually do anything to prevent slower players from playing at the same pace as before, and hence might not make the slowest games go much faster. Also, it comes at the cost of reducing flexibility for those who have to play more sporadically due to personal scheduling.

I’m just offering my thoughts here and I hope they are considered. Very few people even chimed in on the “Ladder games are eternal” thread before a change was ultimately decided upon. Was the speed of ladder games such a huge issue?

I like the idea of decreasing the increment. As yebellz points out, this is the factor that will directly shorten the duration of the games. Shortening the max time will shorten some games in an abrupt fashion when somebody times out. Shortening the increment is forgiving of an absence as long as the average behavior conforms to the increment.

1 Like