Am I the only one who finds it a bit wonky...look at the games the "top" tier players are playing.
1 guy its nothing but 24 hour correspondence. Correspondence allows conditionals; which with the few moves in RK seems like it would be easy to set upa perfect game almost everytime; without ever actually doing anything :l
Then Two more guys are absolutely nothing but 0+1 games.
1 of them...literally only has THREE variant ends (RKs version of a checkmate) all the rest of the wins are from the opponent getting clock flagged; a large percentage of wins within 1-2 moves...lol
Kinda is a slap in the face to the real top tier players ...who are now at the bottom of the leaderboard due to that :l
Am I the only one who finds that a bit ridiculous?
(Not gonna 'name&shame' but goin to the RK leaderboards; I'll bet you find em very quickly :)
I advise you to transfer this to a general forum. I reported a few days ago about a similar situation with one of the players Crazyhouse. I have not yet given my investigation to everyone, although I have uncovered a situation where it is still more obvious. But to raise your rating with the help of games in control 0 + 1 is an old practice, it is quite legal. Now a new type of deception is spread with the help of correspondence.
Im in the leaderboard of RK, never played correspondence in RK.
But I can say that I reported some of the players in the veration for cheating and most of the time Lichess is banning them.
The problem is that you cant ban a player that playing correspondence cuz its legit. So yea its a bit ridiculous.
I observe the situation when a person creates a lot of fake accounts - his pseudo-opponents. It is possible in the correspondence in all variants and from each of them he gets some points. Their dozens - this allows him to enter the top 200 and even higher.
It is a strange situation indeed...
I like Racing Kings and I would consider it an insult for myself to enter the top 10.
This is all I have to say. No more can be said in the public forums.
Sheesh. Thats just jacked up; so anyone who wants to go through the trouble can just challenge correspondence and travel to and from locations (work to home; or heck; a lot of people travel everyday) and then use conditional premove to set the game to a win everytime :l=
No logical reason correspondence shouldn't be listed as only Casual for variants.
Thanks for the replies; glad Im not the only one who finds this goofy.
"and then use conditional premove to set the game to a win everytime "
how does this work. is racing kings solved then
well, I believe that racing kings mainly suffers from the unpopularity of its blitz tournaments.
The Daily is at 4 am Central Europe time which means it is only convenient for the american side and inconvenient for europe, asia, australia.
Additionally spontaneous tournaments fail to bring many 2k+ players, because there aren't enough around at random times that have time to play.
For an arguably unpopular variant it is of big importance that players have a special time/event of the day at which they can rely on finding at least decently rated opponents (decent opponents being +- 250 rating points of theirs).
Since this is not a given, high rated players (and low rated players, but their woes dissappear after analysing a few games) struggle to find good blitz games at all, hosting a tournament usually gets you playing 8 games against 1400-1750 rated players with maybe 10-40 games on their back, while searching for a game with rating restrictions in the lobby can take ages for higher ratings and in my opinion is much more boring then playing tournaments.
This is the reason that I really hope that the admins/developers will eventually give us the racing kings shield tournament at a decent time.
The possibility of earning the trophy will attract more strong players to racing kings and could function as a "meet up" for racing players looking for games at all levels, essentially a full tournament.
It sure looks orderly to have the first week of the month devoted to standard chess and the third to variants, while not having two on one day, but if we put our OCD asside, we have 13 shield tournaments and onl racing kings is left out.
Even if we don't want to overcut a week by making the variant week 8 days (an extra sunday wouldn't hurt, right), we can still fit the rc in the normal chess week, or move the 960 into the sunday on normal chess week, 960 is similar enough to normal chess.
Summary if you were to lazy to read this:
Please give us the shield tournament and a better racing kings tournament time.
But to be complete, racing kings just misses a strong base of players.
@Flaschensammler , all your comments are correct.
The hour of the daily is AWFUL.
Why not a shield tournament for RK?
RK is indeed unpopular.
But the problem with the top 10 remains...
With very few exceptions , the top players are 0+1 mouse-masters or play only correspondence against beginners.
If they tried to do it in another variant (eg. Crazyhouse) the community would throw them to the rubbish bin in no time.
My respect to the few players who create tournaments and normal games and keep this variant alive.
We see people looking for not games, but inflating ratings. Exactly the same people are found in Three Check, Horde, Crazyhouse etc. For fans of variants it is usually important to find the same lovers of variants. This is a normal situation, but here we see something else.