Author: Peter Kappler
Date: 15:39:07 11/13/99
Thanks to all of you who responded to my previous post. I'm pleasantly surprised by the positive reaction so far. Based on the responses, a few guidelines for this tournament seem clear: 1) Only one entry per program. The operator must be the author, or a person directly appointed by the author. 2) Open platform. There is simply no way to enforce uniform hardware. 3) A time control somewhere between G/60 and G/90, with a small (<10 sec) time increment per move. 4) A Swiss pairing system. Looks like there will be too many participants for any form of round robin. One of the more complex issues is how many rounds, and what time of day to play. One drawback of holding a tournament online is that the participants are scattered across different time zones. This means the rounds must be timed carefully, so we aren't playing games at the crack of dawn in the West, or late at night in the East. Almost all of the participants live between GMT-8 and GMT+1. This spans the west coast of the USA to Germany, I think. I'm only aware of two potential participants who fall outside of this windows: Amir Ban, in Israel, and Peter McKenzie in New Zealand. (Peter has already said he can handle a few late nights for a good tourney...) If we played 60+10, then each round would easily finish in under 3 hours, and we could play two games per day without much trouble. The early round could start at 1700 GMT, and the late round would start at 2000 GMT, finishing at around 2300 GMT. A bit late in Europe, but not too bad. A 90+10 time control is also doable, it just means starting at 1600 GMT, and finishing around midnight GMT. The bottom line is that we can probably only manage 2 rounds per day, so I think we'd need to play for two weekends, which would be 8 total rounds. I'd like to hear some discussion on the issues of time controls and start times. It might be useful to compile a list of the time zones where we all live. (I'm in US Pacific: GMT-8) On to other issues: It seems likely that we can get ICC to promote this event. Peter McKenzie and I had a conversation with an ICC admin this morning - he's interested in this idea. ICC would probably want to call it the "ICC Computer Championship", which seems appropriate. ICC could also probably supply one or two admins to act as tournament directors. It's possible that we could use one of the automated ICC "tomato" bots to generate pairings, but I'm not sure how we'd deal with first round seedings... Another question is when should event should take place? I don't have strong feelings about this, except that I think we need to allow enough time for people to free up two weekends, plus it would be nice to give time for word to spread about the tournament. Finally, many of us would want time to prepare for such an event. My feeling is that it shouldn't take place before the end of December. Christmas Day and New Years Day both fall on a Saturday this year - those weekends are probably out of the question. The ICC admin I spoke with said he would prefer not to have this coincide with the Wijk aan Zee super-GM tournament, which he thought was sometime in January. The timing of the event isn't too important to me, except that I wouldn't want to rush it. What do others think? I can think of some other technical issues, like how to handle the case where someone loses their internet connection in the middle of the round. How has this been handled at computer events in the past? A final note: A few of you posted that you'd prefer an event that was held over a longer period of time, where the round times weren't necessarily fixed, and the participants could schedule games on their own. My experience is that these events lose their appeal after a few weeks. It's hard to keep the interest level high over a longer period of time. As always, I welcome feedback. I'm sure I've missed some issues, too. When we think we have everything worked out, we can start serious discussions with the people at ICC. --Peter
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