Western Dan Challenge (Kyu player prizes too!) UPDATE: $1550 in prizes now!

Any granular details? I guess most curious to see how many games the top players have played

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Yeah, and how does 4000 games compare to a typical month?

Also, what’s going on tonight? Given there’s this challenge going on, it should be easy to get a game, right? But there’s none available for me to join and no one is accepting my game. Seems pretty quiet on OGS… :pensive:

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What would you want to compare here? Because in a typical month 0 games are played as part of the Western Dan Challenge…

I noticed that after the first few days it got significantly harder to find a game (altho rarely passing 30 mins even recently). I don’t know how it’s been the last couple days as I’ve been taking days off and am probably not gonna make a run to complete the challenge of 100 games anymore. I got very frustrated at my play and figured it might be likely that me playing up to that pace from a basically nonexistant pace only a month before might be a bit like overtraining in physical sports: too much load can sometimes be worse than not enough.

Granted there was one day where I broke through 1k, and it was looking up, but I fell immediately the day after likely due to fatigue.

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Compare to how many games are played on OGS in general in a typical month without WDC. I guess what I really want to know is this: Is 4000 extra games because of this challenge a significant boost to the usual number of games or a mere drop in the ocean…?

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We have seen a significant boom in weekly games played here since Covid started, so I’m afraid there is no longer any “typical month” with which to compare it to. (much like most things these days…)

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So weekly new games is currently about 200k?
And the WDC added only 2k to that in the 1st 2 weeks of this month?

More than a drop in the ocean, but not much more than a drop in a thimble.

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Ah well a drop in a thimble is sizeable! As for me personally, I’d say my game count has increased maybe double?

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I haven’t checked the numbers, but I guess many of the 200k will be 9x9, while the WDC are all 19x19 if I’m not mistaken.

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@BHydden I think a comparison to a typical week under covid-19 is OK as the challenge is also happening under covid-19.

And thanks for the stats. Very interesting! So WDC = approx a 1% boost to total games, i.e. pretty small. But, as noted by @richyfourtytwo, would be interesting to get the proportion of those 200k games per week that are 19x19, ranked, non-bot games with time >= 1m + 10s x 5 before and during the WDC, i.e. how much of a boost to games of this type has the challenge achieved? In effect, how successful has the challenge been in achieving its goal?

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It’s also the Western Dan Challenge, after all, with the primary purpose of attracting stronger players.

So we should be wondering what the playing increase was of players 5k and stronger

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Thanks, @bugcat, you are the first ever to (at least indirectly) call me a dan!

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Every OGS SDK’s a dan somewhere :wink:

(Taiwan, WBaduk, some clubs in Japan…)

Well, perhaps not every on the new ranks. It was probably true of the old ranks, though.

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Worth noting that not all game ids are actual games. Reviews are included in this number, as are cancellations, and many also appear to be dead links upon further investigation so there are probably also other uses. The trend should still be reliable I would imagine but the actual numbers are nothing more than an upper bound.

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One could could come up with some silly lower estimates too.

When I look at live games there’s probably like about 100-200 going on most of the time. If on average they took like half an hour

100224*7≈33,600 live games a week.

Adding another 1k a week to that doesn’t seem too bad :slight_smile: (although maybe some are correspondence that are finishing quickly and/or just happen to be finishing within the tournament timeframe).

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That is a seriously impressive list!

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Woo, I was wondering where the list is. Didn’t realise it was already updated there!

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Oh lol same when was this posted haha

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Hitting my 100th game today!

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Grats!