Stacker News Chess Tournament?!
I've been playing more chess on lichess recently.
Even though I am not very successful, learning and applying chess openings, their goals (piece development, controlling the center etc.) and some common ideas like pinning pieces or forks made chess really fun! I now feel like I actually know what I am doing (or should be doing) instead of just randomly trying to win or hoping for blunders.
This made me think: wouldn't it be cool if we would have a chess tournament on SN? I know that @itsTomekK and @needcreations_ expressed interest in ~chess in the past. Are there more chess players here? View this as the post to gauge interest and ideas. What follows are my probably underdeveloped ideas.
First phase: Correspondence games
My current idea is that we have two phases. In the first phase, everyone plays correspondence games against everyone else. A correspondence game is a game where you have a long time to make your moves, so no need to schedule a specific block of time with your opponent. We could set a time limit of 1 day per turn to not draw out the games for too long:
According to this site, the average number of moves per chess game is 79, so this would mean that once a correspondence game started, on average, it should be finished after 79 days.
The analysis revealed that, on average, a chess game lasts for 79 half moves. For clarity, a half move in chess refers to a single turn by either White or Black.
This is still quite long but I think this is okay. To get this tournament done in a timely fashion, we would need to play these correspondence games simultaneously; so everyone would need to make a turn per game every day to not lose by timeout.
The results of these games are recorded on SN. A win is +1, a draw is +0 and a loss is -1. The players with the best scores then continue to the next phase. How many players move to the next phase depends on how many players there even are. If we only have 8 players, then it makes sense that only the top 2 or 4 move to the next phase. The correspondence phase is basically just a way to eliminate most players at once.
We could also do a group phase with fixtures if we don't want to play too many games at once. We could also not do correspondence games but commit more time and play time limit games as explained next.
Second phase: Finals
This phase is a single elimination tournament with brackets. The games now have time limits per side so players need to schedule a specific block of time. So for example, we could do games that give each player 30 minutes so games are one hour max.
The Price
Hopefully obviously, there should be something at stake. It's all fun and games as long as someone loses a bunch of money. So we could do simply buy-ins of 10k sats or something. Winner takes all?
Footnotes