Tournament moderators

Originally posted by Ragnorak
Read this post, and the next 7...
http://www.timeforchess.com/board/showthread.php?threadid=46202&page=2#post_828738

I don't agree that most of the people that "abuse" (whether purposely or not) the banded tournaments are people who leave for a while. Me and fckallie ended up competing in the final of a rookie tournament when we first joined. I didn't ...[text shortened]... ional players from banded tournaments, which Russ implemented within about 10 minutes.

D

I agree with this in theory .. I am in 2 tournaments well below my current rating, but i joined them when i was just out of provisional rating (my initial 20 odd games were against a friend of mine that was just learning and provisional too). The problem is i don't think ratings settle in until you've played 200 odd games against a variety of opponents. I would love to gracefully withdraw from the tournament 1200-1450 but there is no option. I think most people in my situation would do the right thing if given the chance. After all who wants a tournament win against 1200's when you are rated 1800+? There probably is no magic formula for this. I think tournament mods are a good idea, then we can sort these things out with a little individual discretion. A community site has the advantage of being able to solve problems using its greatest asset .. the community.

Originally posted by idioms
A community site has the advantage of being able to solve problems using its greatest asset .. the community.

Ding! Exactly!! The forums require discretion, so do tournaments. OTB tournaments have umpires, why not here??

Carausius Grouped Random 1550-1700 could have been an interesting tournament for me. But what do we find hidden in the middle of the group? DoJoCleaning with a nice 1560-rating. Ok, that's fine you might say. But - back in August he had a rating of 2090!

Am I joining this tournament? No way!
Am I pissed that the site admins doesn't react? You bet!

I do think mods are a decent solution, however I still like my option better...

First off, p.1200s cannot enter tournaments. People who are still rising is another problem which this does not address. For that, I suggest doubling the current K for games 21-40 (if they reach a point where K is normally less than 32, then their effective K is twice that K) and a K multiplier of 1.5 for games 41-60.


Instead of creating 5 tournaments
Alpha November 0 - 1299
Alpha November 1300 - 1499
etc.

Create 1 tournament. Alpha November which allows entrants equal to (#bands * #desired entrants per band).

Once registration closes, take the lower #entrants/#bands and make it the lowest band, then the next #bands people for section 2 etc.

This leaves you with non-static bands, but does manage to keep the skill level about even.

Why I like this solution: In the past I have signed up for one band, gained a couple of rating points and joined the same tournament in a different band (it did not kick me out of my first registration despite now having a rating that was above the tournaments ceiling).

Essentially it allows the most current (highest) rating to be used when starting a tournament instead of the players rating when signing up.


An minor tweak to this which would maintain the static bands would be to allow an indefinate number of entrants and just process them in in a FIFO manner and continuing until all the bands are full or until there are no more entrants. You would probably want to send an email to those who didn't make it into the tournament however...

Originally posted by zebano
First off, p.1200s cannot enter tournaments.

Here you are wrong. There is a bug, unless Russ has fixed it in the meantime. See earlier in the thread for discussion.


I like this one:


Instead of creating 5 tournaments
Alpha November 0 - 1299
Alpha November 1300 - 1499
etc.

Create 1 tournament. Alpha November which allows entrants equal to (#bands * #desired entrants per band).


I think it would be alot of work though, and it still faces the problem of X who used to be rated 500 points above his current rating eliminating people who ought to have had the chance to progress to the next round. A tourney mod would still be needed to manually tweak the groups. And the only way to handle people whose grade has not yet settled is for them to provide a tourney mod with evidence of a grade, and then (s)he can move them to a different group.

This does not solve the problems. Tourney mods do. Why delay?

Gezza

why not learn form other sides?
in gameknot tourneys with more rounds you will be pushed to an upper band when you reach the limit. Of course this make only sense with tournements with more rounds and smaller group sizes.

Originally posted by KarstenK
why not learn form other sides?
in gameknot tourneys with more rounds you will be pushed to an upper band when you reach the limit. Of course this make only sense with tournements with more rounds and smaller group sizes.

It is a possible solution but what if the player in question goes 2 rounds in a 1200-1300 tournie, then gets pushed up a band for the final and ends up winning the 1300-1400 band, even though they didn't compete at that level in the first two rounds? It's a bit unfair on the other players who faced stronger opposition in their first two rounds.

Ragnorak has suggested a formula to resolve the issue which i like a lot. If you look back two pages in this thread you'll see it. 🙂

This site needs more automation in the tournament system not more user control. A formula or system which automatically weeds unsuitable players while allowing suitable players in is required. Ragnorak has suggested a possible one in the past and it's been refined to the point where I think it will work quite well (at least well enough to be worthy of testing) and yet nothing has been done.

Originally posted by XanthosNZ
This site needs more automation in the tournament system not more user control. A formula or system which automatically weeds unsuitable players while allowing suitable players in is required. Ragnorak has suggested a possible one in the past and it's been refined to the point where I think it will work quite well (at least well enough to be worthy of testing) and yet nothing has been done.

This is that thread, go back two pages...

Originally posted by XanthosNZ
This site needs more automation in the tournament system not more user control. A formula or system which automatically weeds unsuitable players while allowing suitable players in is required. Ragnorak has suggested a possible one in the past and it's been refined to the point where I think it will work quite well (at least well enough to be worthy of testing) and yet nothing has been done.

I think you're missing something here. While i really like the elegance of Rag's proposal, there are other issues that need resolving that moderators could deal with easily.

1. Choice
Currently people need to request tournaments by sending feedback. This is silly, as it means Russ/Chris spend enormous amounts of time reading and responding to feedback. Mods could deal with this easily! Look at the tournaments page now. There are no unbanded tournies. There is a full thematic tournie (while it might be the second we've had this month, we didn't get any for about 6 months previous!). There is little scope regarding timecontrols or group sizes. There are no duals. In other words, there is little or no choice!

People subscribe to play in tournaments, they deserve a wide selection of managed tournaments, that is what they pay for!

2. Corrections
While Rags system is INFINATELY better than the current system, it is still possible for a strong player to end up in a weak band, or a weak player to end up in a strong band. What happens if his rating calculation doesn't decide someone is too strong for a tournament till round 3? Does it boot them from the tournie? Does it let them stay? Can a computer make this judgement? Of course it can't. Common sense is what's needed. If admin implemented an algorithm as a solution, they'd still get complaints as it cannot solve all the issues. If Mods were in place then discussion could be had to resolve issues. Something which Admin simply don't have time to do.

3.Tournament Overview
Mods could remove the cheats, which has needed doing ever since the page was created!

discuss...

Originally posted by Marinkatomb

3.Tournament Overview
Mods could remove the cheats, which has needed doing ever since the page was created!

discuss...

I think that there are a number of points in favour of tournament moderators. Volunteers to keep track of the requests for tournament types and so forth takes the burden of the site admins, who want to develope new features for the site and improve old ones rather than try to make descisions about whether a 6. Bg5 Najdorf is a more interesting thematic tournament than a 6. Be3 one.

But where they would really come in handy is in adjudicating games between banned players and the presumed innocent. This has also come up in the thread about cheats in the Clan Leagues Thread 57230. The current system of leaving the pre-banning results standing and giving survivors all three points per game can't be right. But it's also not fair just to set all results to zero, as if someone had beaten them, or was going to beat them, then they deserve all three points - and draws deserve the point as well. The only way of sorting this out is moderators, as I can't see a way out of adjudicating incomplete games, which you can't do properly soley with an engine.

Originally posted by DeepThought
I think that there are a number of points in favour of tournament moderators. Volunteers to keep track of the requests for tournament types and so forth takes the burden of the site admins, who want to develope new features for the site and improve old ones rather than try to make descisions about whether a 6. Bg5 Najdorf is a more interesting thematic way out of adjudicating incomplete games, which you can't do properly soley with an engine.

That is an excellent point! These moderators would serve a good service to the Leagues also. If there were say, 4-6 Mods managing this side of the site, it would also allow for more complex tournament structures. We could organise a sight championship for example, much the same as the OTB World championship is organised, with a reigning champion. Such a tournament would not be possible (or at least it would be too time consuming for admin..) with the current system.

I agree with Ragnarok (and probably many people here) that we need a better system for tournaments, but I don't really think he/she (or "it"?) has the right system. RedHotPawn should 'simply' adopt the modern Glicko I or Glicko II system like FICS or SchemingMind. In the Glicko, all players have a rating and a RD (ratings deviation) measuring the uncertainty of the rating. When a player doesn't play for a long time, or if he's losing/winning all his games, the value of the RD will rise, meaning the rating is probably not an accurate measurement of the player's strength. This system is also very interesting because people are getting faster an accurate rating as when the RD is high, you get/lose more rating points.

On FICS, a rating is only considered stable when the RD is below 80. To be fair, if RedHotPawn was working with the Glicko sytem, you could only allow player with a RD below 80 to joind banded tournament (they, obviously, could join other tournaments). When your RD is below 80, it's a proof your rating is accurate. I just entered "Mini banded Duel V 1500-1550", officially; I'm the player with the highest rating. In reality, my chances are low as there's a 1800+ player rated barely 1500 among us. If we were using the Glicko system, this person would have a very high RD because this person has lost many games in a row (and has probably not played for a while, another thing that makes RD increase). Also, because a high RD means more points are lost/gained, those players that are 500 pts below their real strenght would get faster to their real rating.

Tournaments moderators could be very usefull as Marinkatomb have explained, and they can probably do a lot for this site, but I don't think allowing them to judge who can and who can't enter a tournaments is the good way, it would probably lead to at least as much dispute as we have right now. On the other hand, the Glicko system provide an objective and accurate system to know who should and who should'nt be in a banded tournament.

More info on the system;

http://math.bu.edu/people/mg/glicko/

Originally posted by Marinkatomb
1. Choice
Currently people need to request tournaments by sending feedback. This is silly, as it means Russ/Chris spend enormous amounts of time reading and responding to feedback. Mods could deal with this easily!

Ahem... 😉

Thread 52938

D

Originally posted by Marinkatomb
3.Tournament Overview
Mods could remove the cheats, which has needed doing ever since the page was created!

Cheats have already been removed from this page.

D