Auto Pairing Pools?

I see that these were once a thing here on Lichess. No more? When did they do away with them and why? Personally, I can live with or without them but I'm curious now.

Thanks

They did away with them because they tried a new way of doing them which didn't work. You went to the pool page first, which showed all the players that were "in the pool." Then you could "join" it and wait to get paired. What would happen is if there was nobody in the pool, nobody would join it, meaning there was no chance of anyone ever joining the less popular pools and gaining some momentum. This also allowed people to have some influence on who they play and who they don't play (oh, JoeX is in the pool, I'm not going to join, he always beats me).

The main ideas of pools are:

1. get a game quickly
2. standardized time control
3. can't control who you play against
4. separate rating for that pool

The combination of 2-4 makes for a large increase in the reliability of the ratings, while #1 is just another feature that makes the pool system attractive. The lichess implementation failed at 1 and 3 (they even slowed the pairing down even more by doing some weird "wave-pairing") while providing active incentive to not join at all (welp, nobody is in the pool).

After the pools got off to a decent start due to being new, they eventually slowed way down and almost died completely before being removed completely. The guys in charge in the forums pretty much realized the implementation was all wrong and said if they come back it will be in a new form.

Live and learn. Hope they do come back and hope they mimic ICC's implementation much more closely the second time.

Awesome. Thank you very much for the explanation.

Yea, pretty much what DunnoItAll said. The implementation turned out to be fundamentally flawed, and we kinda just decided that the arena tournaments did a pretty good job of acting as pools.

There's always a blitz/bullet/superblitz tournament running - or about to run - and they have a lot of qualities of a pool pairing system.

Considering this, it's unlikely that we'll reimplement pools any time soon.

I find this tremendously disappointing. To me, the attractive thing was that pool ratings were the most official and competitive, which is what attracted most people. Arena tournaments are short term and don't have specific ratings associated with them (and if they did, they'd be flawed because of silly berserking stuff).

I see why Arena tournaments are fun for people, but they make no sense outside of bullet games (longer games really make the most important thing "who can win the fastest, which depends way too much on your opponent not just stalling or being slow, and has nothing to do with chess anyway), and I hate bullet games.

The small number of pool players coupled with 1900-2000+ rated strong players was what I found disappointing. These strong players would have a significantly lower rating in the pools than normal and would dominate the "competition" so much that only above average or stronger players were attracted to the pools, giving no chance to the majority of people.

Exacerbated by the fact that everyone could look up who was sitting there waiting for them when they entered the pool. So much better to just click a button and get a quick game against someone near your rating that's also looking for one. It's a simple idea with powerful results. Really think it would be a huge draw for serious players, much like it is on ICC (and lichess could easily do it better).

Absolutely. I remember towards the end where there would be a single person in a pool, camping there like a spider waiting for his prey.

I agree in that Lichess could do this better than ICC. ICC hasn't really changed anything about their core structure in ages. They've been sitting with 1/0, 3/0, 5/0, 15/0, 45/45, and Chess960 pools for years. Now, this is a nice array of time controls offered in the pools but I feel that it's outdated. Considering that FIDE's rated blitz is 3+2 and rated rapid is 15+10, there's really no reason to not have an increment on these time controls in the pairing pools. Here on Lichess, things like this are addressed weekly. On ICC...as said, the wheels of change seem to turn unbelievably slower.

I guess we'll have to wait and see.

It's a pretty big decision to add a feature like that. One of the main concerns is fragmentation of the community. And is it really worth it?

I might be coming across as ignorant, but I don't really see a huge difference between getting a pairing via the main lobby and getting a pairing via a pool.

Functionally on the surface, the only difference is that instead of opening a menu and selecting the time control and variant you want in detail, you're given a hot-link to a certain time control and a certain variant.

Beyond that, where's the great functional difference?

Being paired with someone blindly? I'm pretty sure most people create games and get auto-paired anyway. Not a lot of people pay close attention to the list and snipe individual seeks. Honestly that list on the homepage has been tossed up for removal a few times.

Not being able to abort games? We've recently implemented measures to punish people who rampantly abort games just because they don't like their opponent.

Having a dedicated rating to the pool? It seems like a small gain considering my previous points. That's really the only gain I see and it doesn't need pools to exist. We can just make a 5+0 rating that gets used when you play 5+0 standard games.

The only question then is abuse of the rating system via boosting, and we've already got tools to deal with that.

So what else is really there to gain?

I apologise if I'm coming across as harsh/close-minded. If I'm wrong, show me why I'm wrong.