Feature suggestion: Tournament type where lichess is not doing pairing

One of the more limiting factors with lichess is the lack of parameters for tournaments. One way to get around this is to create a type of tournament where lichess is not involved in the pairing at all. That way, a director can run the tournament on the side, either with pen and paper or with separate software.

My suggestion is simple: Allow people to join the tournament, and when it starts, the director creates challenges, much like "Play with a friend", but he sets both players, rather than creating the game for himself. A time parameter for the players to accept the challenge means you can control the flow of the rounds. I mainly aim for blitz tournaments with rounds, rather than Arena, but I guess it could also be used for tournaments with e.g. a weekly round.

Why this suggestion? We have lots of kids from our club and from neighbouring clubs who want to play fair and round based tournaments, and also play teams matches with other clubs where the skill level difference between top and bottom is so high that Arena is just not suitable. The need is growing from the corona situation, since these arrangements could normally be made at the club, where you can easily direct each kid to sit at a specified table.

The suggestion outlined above will provide the opportunity to handle a large variety of tournament types and teams matches. Elaborate score keeping by lichess is not necessary, as the director keeps track of the results for drawing purposes outside of lichess anyway.

I support @Randomeister's request.

This feature would help me create tournaments for my future students in Lichess Classes.

I support this request.
This would be very helpful to implement a club life here on Lichts during the corona time.

You can already do that. Just send the participants a message with the parings. Let each white player challenge each black player.

If this is easier to implement than a Swiss or round-robin format, I'm definitely up for it. Great out of the box thinking here! #1

#4

I always appreciate feedback!

Several reasons this won't work:
* You want to have all the players in a tournament, so that you know who's participating. But as it stands, in a tournament drawing is administered by lichess, so you have to get all players to pause their participation, a required manual step that could go wrong since it feels counterintuitive
* Telling people who to challenge and with which color, is another step that relies on the players to take action, which could go wrong, instead of one director who administers everything. This is especially critical when your participants are kids
* You want to use the basic score keeping of a tournament, to keep track of incoming results, but if players are challenging each other, their results won't show up in the tournament
* The added suggested feature of a time parameter for accepting the challenge means the director has control over the flow of the tournament. Asking people to challenge, the director has less ability to control the timing of each round

This could be a solution for the topics discussed in:

lichess.org/forum/lichess-feedback/the-introduction-of-swiss-and-round-robin-for-tournaments-on-lichess

I like it, nice idea! You leave the problems created in each tournament format (accepting players, matching players, dealing with dropouts and late joiners, never ending increment games, players gaming the pairing system etc.) up to the tournament creator to manage, sort of like managing Simuls. It might be a good deal of work upfront to make an interface for tournament creators to assign pairings after each round, but I think that would probably mean fewer mistakes than telling individual players who to challenge. If that initial investment is doable though, tournament creators could run all sorts of customizable tournaments without any server side management: Swiss, Round Robin, Multi-game matches, Knockout, Double Knockout, All-Play-All Group Stages, custom seeding, you name it.

Yeah, I like the idea of in-platform tournaments with external pairing software (or manual pairings).

So, what's the procedure if someone actually shows interest in developing a new feature? Will that be announced somehow, in this thread or somewhere else?