Tournament formats

Dear Lichess,

Even though the Arena format of tournaments is great for large bullet and blitz tournaments, it leads to very undesirable results for smaller groups and/or longer time controls.

If the groups are small, chances are you'll be playing the same players a lot, simply because they've finished their game at the same time you did.

And if the time controls are longer, actually using your time is a poor strategy. If you want to win, you'll have to play as many games as possible in the alotted time. Which is just silly when you're playing rapid or classical time controls.

Now that we're in the midst of the Corona crisis, many regular chess club players are now signing up to be able to play each other, same with my club. We organize small tournaments to play each other, but playing - say - a closed rapid tournament with 25 players is just a very strange way to play a tournament.

So long story short, my suggestion is: add different types of tournaments. Swiss, round-robin, stuff like that.

Ping.

Anyone?

The easiest option for now is to make the pairings using another program and keep track of the results in something like Excel. Than play against each other on Lichess.

This would be a great upgrade and we could have our monthly Blitz tournament everyone against everyone on lichess.org as long as the initial restrictions because of Corana are in place.

@decaspar Yeah, we've considered this... but manually administering a tournament with 25 players seems highly unpracticle to me. This might work if it was one game per day in classical time control, but for blitz and rapid... sounds like hell to me.

For example this site is really easy to manage: www.printyourbrackets.com/round-robin-generator.php
What is the problem you have which makes it seem like hell? Maybe we can think of an solution. Because unfortunaly Lichess doesnt have this feature yet so you'll have to be creative.