Thematic tournament choose to only play white or only play black

Hey lichess and lichess members,

One of my favorite things about your website is the ability to play thematic tournaments. Starting a game with a specific opening position allows me to practice my repertoire.

I'm wondering, is there a way to choose to "only get the black pieces" or "only get the white pieces" before the said thematic tournament starts?

The reason I ask is this: If a Queen's Indian defense tournament is held, I would only want the black pieces. Why? Because when I have the white pieces, I play e4, not d4, so playing the white pieces in an Queen's Indian defense would not fit into my repertoire.

Same for the Ruy Lopez. I would play the Ruy Lopez as White but not as black against an e4 opening.

Another note: I imagine, if a player were to choose"only get the black pieces" in a tournament, they may deserve some small level of compensation, such as an elevated point system like with going Berserk in the Arena.

These are just some thoughts from an avid chess fan. I personally would love to have the feature of choosing to play all games in a thematic tournament as black or play all games in a thematic tournament as white.

What are your thoughts?

PS I noticed on the tournament page of lichess, when I use ctrl+f to search for "thematic", I would get, in this case, the Scotch. Is there any way to see what thematic tournaments are coming up in the future? As far as I can tell, it only shows one opening at a time, just in different time formats. Or maybe I'm overlooking something?

It seems like a good idea, but I see two big flaws.

1) There will almost surely be an uneven number of players that want a certain color. Suppose it's 20 that want white, and 10 that want black, then what? White players wait around for a game while black players play a ton more games and due to more games have a greater shot to win more points.

2) White side generally has a small advantage no matter the opening and most will choose white.

I think the whole point of a thematic tournament may be to level the playing field by ensuring that very few people have an opening advantage, similarly to a computer championship.

If this happened, everyone would take black for instance in King's Gambit tournaments to gain rating points.

So only allow people to join evenly by choice of starting color. Seems simple.