The introduction of swiss and round robin for tournaments on lichess

First of all, thanks to @psuter for all your effort and your insights! I wasn't around here in 2014 so that is good to hear. The conclusion that Swiss tournaments are not for the general Lichess public and are too hard to finetune sounds very fair.

But it is still my opinion that for (enclosed) club tournaments the Swiss format would work well. "People were frustrated that the tournament ended as soon as they had played everyone" doesn't seem to be an issue. Mind you, that is an issue now at Chess.com. There, if a Swiss tournament with 8 players is organized, the tournaments is closed after 3 rounds, which is of course ridiculous. That has happened multiple times to a neighbouring club. I've been able to organise Swiss otb blitz tournaments with 20 players and 9 rounds without any problems. So even if the old system will be revived, I can name at least two clubs in my region which will transfer from Chess.com to here to have better Swiss tournaments. They're used to waiting in between rounds as well.

As everyone can see, this have been a lively but imo constructive discussion with 5000 views already and 100 posts filled with reasons. Not all of them are refuted, and I would still urge @thibault and others to reconsider implementing Swiss tournaments or giving team leaders the opportunity to manual pair within a tournament setting.

@TacticalBert amen.

I've been watching this discussion from the side line with interest, but yes... in this Corona crisis a lot of OTB chess clubs are looking for ways to organize tournaments online. For this Lichess would be the perfect platform... *if* there were tournament formats other than arena, and specifically swiss. (In my view, arena format only works well for large bullet and blitz tournaments. For anything outside that scope, it's just terrible.)

I can imagine that it's difficult to implement, and I trust the developers to make wise decisions there. But I urge them to keep in mind that, despite such effort, it would definitely increase the value of Lichess to OTB clubs quite a lot.

Thanks, @puster, for sharing insights and experiences from a developer's point of view. Very much appreciated!

I don't see a reason why would it be impossible to create 7 round swiss for 8 players...

#104 Did you said that because of lichess.org/blog/XqxUIxIAACEAxMBl/super-gm-charity-tournament-to-be-held-on-lichess.org-12---14-may?

nope, that's round robin

Then, I will say: "I don't see a reason why would it be impossible to create a round robin for 8 russian players..." :P

Let's imagine there is 3 types of tournaments:
- arena
- round robin
- swiss
players could choose the best for yourself

Tell me am I right?
Whats the real problem?

Greetings, @redjok!

Regarding your comment in #108.

The problem with Lichess is not that the developers CANNOT implement tournaments in Swiss and Round Robin format. The problem is that apparently they DO NOT WANT to do it.

This follows from the attitude they (and their advocates) display when:

1- They claim that they made initiatives years ago, but this failed.
2- They defend the Arena system through and through (as if this were the panacea).
3- They suggest to users that those interested in other types of tournaments can take steps to organize them themselves.

Bottom line: We are not likely to see Swiss tournaments or Round Robin at Lichess UNLESS a new generation of developers take the initiative to program and maintain protocols for this kind of event.

It is an unfortunate loss for chess and a contradiction for Lichess, as this platform boasts of being progressive.

@CarlosMagnussen (#104): I Swiss tournament with 8 players and 7 rounds is impossible, indeed. When you do successive rounds of Swiss parings, at a certain point no more rounds without repetition of pairings are possible. (When you allow players to be paired more than once, this is not Swiss any more.) This will happen almost certainly in round n-1 (where n is the number of players), but most likely much earlier. This is the reason (@TacticalBert in #101) that chess.com does not allow Swiss tournaments with more rounds than n/2.

This is one of the intricacies that makes it difficult to implement a Swiss tournament that works smoothly under all possible settings possibly chosen by the users.