I suddenly got added to about 16 new games—without having any idea where these all came from (I didn't do anything). How on earth did this happen? I'm not sure I can even keep up with all of these games…

My game count jumped by, like, 50, and I'd wondered if there was a mistake, but… no, it turns out I just got a little tournament-happy.

It looks like all yours came from the Xiangqi championship. You were part of an earlier one, and championships keep you automatically registered for the next one unless you manually leave.

I notice, though, that the previous round was single games but this one is doubles. For all my years on the site, I have no clue what determines which it'll be.

make sure to remember to un-register for stuff , otherwise tournaments can blind-side you.

it appears that all new championships are now double round robin. Also new to this site, all championships appear to begin on the first of the month. So that means you can get slammed on the first of the month if you do not plan accordingly…(I had new championships begin yesterday for four tournaments, a total of 80 new games!!)

If you resign your games on your first move, you should not lose rating points.

that is true for most games (but I think there are exceptions, like connect6 where your first move is forced in the center).

Heck, I don't care, I am playing all 80 of them, except for the ones I resigned on move one to the unbeatable Xiangqi players (they must be Super Grandmasters because no one can beat them)

Yeah, unfortunately the site can't differentiate when moves are bade as a precondition to truly beginning play, so games like the English/American Checkers tournament, with its three random move start, don't have resigning as a way to simply walk away; someone in mine hemorrhaged paints by doing so anyway.

But yeah, I'm committed, too. 50 new games at one move every 36 hours means about 33 moves per day, which is roughly 4/5ths of a chess game per day.

Me telling myself 166 simultaneous games is completely healthy and manageable:

It makes me a little sad that I will have to cancel some of my tournaments. I just don't have the time. This site is a lot of fun but it's not my only hobby.

I wish we had smaller groups and more levels to these championship tournaments.

Cheers!

Ideally, championships should be decided by contenders playing at their best. With the number of new games starting at once, we're going as far from that ideal as we can. Nobody will be able to devote the time to each game that the game deserves.

Double round with 20 players is too much for me. Will have to resign.

Honestly I preferred it when championships started immediately after all rounds of championship games had finished and you played your opponents just once. That way you got games more often and not as many at the same time as well.

Me too. I had two of them start at once and I'm resigning all the Go 9 games. I'll play the Chess960 gamers this time, but if the rules stay the same, I'll withdraw before the next one starts. I may even withdraw from regular chess. The only one I'll stay in is Havannah4, because there aren't 20 players.

At least it always takes only a few moves before lose the LYNK-games. So I'll be down from 300 games to 260 quit fast ;-)

Christiano, I think I'd like double round robin, if only there were smaller tournaments. Smaller even than there used to be so there wouldn't be twice as many games as there used to be (or 5 times as many, as we have now).

Well, I guess if the tournamen will be divided in smaller groups - fewer players - the amount of games would drop significantly. If you have 2 games against each opponent, that seems reasonable to me.

David, great minds think alike, right? :-)

Here is an extreme example of a huge championship, 25 player double round robin, started June 1

https://www.littlegolem.net/jsp/tournament/tournament.jsp?trnid=tzaar.ch.37.1.1

So that means each player has 48 Tzaar games.

Ocean's 11 has 21 players, started June 1

https://www.littlegolem.net/jsp/tournament/tournament.jsp?trnid=oceans11.ch.2.1.1

I am in the Ocean's 11, and don't mind having 40 new games. I am not in the tzaar, thankfully, that is way too many at once! Maybe with 20 plus players there should be more sections with fewer players in each section?

Does anyone know of any other championships with more than 20 in one section?

https://www.littlegolem.net/jsp/tournament/tournament.jsp?trnid=oceans11.ch.2.1.1

https://www.littlegolem.net/jsp/tournament/tournament.jsp?trnid=tzaar.ch.37.1.1Tzaar championship

I think Carroll's got the right idea with that tournament strategy.

I do share (I believe) general sentiment, it is simply too much to

• play double round robin
• have just one tier (level) for the whole championship

at the same time

We should either have several tiers (as before) or don't play double round robin (do realize it is more fair, but number of games is simply too high)

Also starting championship on the 1st next month seem more reasonable than current split - if you register to several championships which by coincidence starts at the same time, you are overloaded ;)

So more less repeating what others are saying ;)

Just my 2 cents…

I think having several tiers to each championship (thus smaller groups) would have the cool promotion/relegation element we see in soccer leagues. I'd love to be in tier 5 of some game with the goal of someday getting to tier 3. Much more fun than knowing I'm not at all the same skill level of the other people in the league.

I concur, Eykca!

I'm in a Xiangqi championship with two tiers that began in May. Either the removal of tiers just started this month, then, or some of the championships must have tiers still, just fewer, much larger ones. The idea of being hit with 228 games of 19x19 Go all at once is a terror to keep the bravest among us up at night.

Anyway, I like tiers too, and their whole advancement/relegation aspect–which is strengthened with more of them. Likewise, the double games I like as well, and I think they should run simultaneously so championships aren't multi-year events. I feel like tiers of 5-7 (or maybe 8) people is an ideal amount for double championships.

Definitely I agree - I prefer more frequent, fewer games (I remember I was bored that I don't have any games to play, now it's no fun when I can't remember the games I play).

Smaller groups, single round, or starting rematch after the first games is finished.

So does anyone have the ear of the site admin(s)? It seems like a lot of us agree that there are just too many games starting in each tournament.

I thought I might be able to play one tournament per month, but my schedule just doesn't allow it. I've cancelled all my tournaments except Chess. I'm going to stick to the ladders for the other games I enjoy. I actually came close to quitting the site altogether. Not that I want to, but it was just too much of a time sink for me.

Incidentally I actually do like the set schedule for each tournament. This way I know when I need to prepare for the massive increase in games in my queue.

Have the ear? Richard reads the forums. So, too many games? Do you have a specific remedy in mind?

I also thought that starting a 38-game Tumbleweed tournament was a bit excessive.

That could have been split into two groups of 10 and single round-robin, making it 9-game tournament instead.

making the tournaments single round robin instead of double, if a certain threshold number of players enter, would be one possibility to consider

What if we did triple round robin

A specific remedy? I don't know how the championships are created. Ideally it's automated at this point, and there is a way to change the parameters like the minimum number of players in each “pod”. I would simply lower the minimum number. I don't think too many people would object to that. Do you disagree?

The Tumbleweed champs is a great example. I was in that one, but I resigned all my games where it was my turn. 20 players is too many for one pod, for me at least. I suspect that the minimum number is somewhere around 8-10 and that it's impossible to create a championship with exactly 2 pods. Each level should have twice as many pods as the one above it, so 3 pods would be needed to have 2 levels. Why not have 3 pods of 6-7 players each? Now you are playing only 10-12 games, but you can have promotion and demotion between championships. You might need to adjust the promotion and demotion rules with smaller pods.

A more controversial remedy would be to go back to single round robin. I'm assuming the switch to double RR was done for a reason though. It makes sense from a fairness perspective, especially for games like Chess that have a built in advantage for one side, but what about games that use the pie rule? Do I really need to play the same player twice in Tumbleweed to make it fair?

Just some thoughts. As I said I don't know what goes on behind the scenes. Though I do suspect that we are losing people from the Championships right now, and maybe from the site altogether.

Oh, another remedy might be allowing a championship to have exactly 2 pods, a level 1 and a single level 2. However, I suspect it would be tricky to make the promotion rules work for this case while still working for the more general case of doubling the number of pods in each level.

Will there be a new game avalanche on july 1st? I am still nor recovered from the previous one :-)

I joined the EWN championship out of morbid, masochistic curiosity. I would like to know as well, though, if they're again going to be double tournaments of enormous groups, as I'm playing a psychological game of chicken with myself right now, hopping in and out of July tournaments, knowing I have less than 100 hours to decide if I should tempt fate.

Absent reassurance to the contrary, I'll get on building an ark, then.

It is July.

A suggestion!

As one of the problems currently, championships start at the beginning of the month, meaning that they are bunched into one of 12 starting times. There are 135 variants on the site, meaning that on average 11 or 12 championships will start at once.

I think you should consider breaking that up into weekly starts, according to the Xth Friday/Sunday/Monday/Any day works really of the year (with the 53rd, if applicable, left open–perhaps as a free space for new year's tournaments. Done that way, the 135 would be spread across 52 potential starts, bringing it down to a much more manageable 2 or 3 at once at maximum.

I think it makes a good compromise between keeping things regular and not overburdening players with The Flood™, and would be an improvement whether the problem with massive groups of double tournament championships changes or not. Any thoughts?

Double those numbers; I forgot it's twice a year. Still!

If every month 100-200 new games are added, I think I slowly withdraw from this site. It's just too much.

I made the hardest and most painful decision of my life (being a little hyperbolic, but I am obsessive about finishing what I start) this month and resigned from the Conhex, Hex 19, and Dameo Championships just to cut down on the number I was playing, since 300+ was really, really pushing it. Conhex made up 48 of those. I kept some others (I play EWN with only about 37 brain cells), but in all seriousness, I can't do championships if they're going to continue to be like this.

My programming logic for starting any group:-

Every so often add 1 to the polling value of groups that have the minimum participants required to start new games

Start the group if enough players which has the highest value of POLLING+PARTICIPANTS and reset those values to zero

I recommend be more selective with which championships you play, and look ahead to see what is starting on the first of each month. I find myself playing more ladders lately. Ladders are nice because you only get a small steady trickle instead of a flood of games.

I know; that's more or less what I did in swallowing my own issues and bowing out. I basically stuck my toe in the water to see if things were fixed, since often changes aren't mentioned (I should have asked about it directly instead of in the forums), but sure enough it was the same.

The problem with ladders is it'll be days and days going through inactive players. Rated games and the mini tournaments seem the best bet to me. There unfortunately doesn't tend to be the player variety that way that one sees in championships.

Or I could join championships anyway and flip a coin on each game to resign about half, if I want to be a Batman villain about it.

I recently joined a few Go ladders and the experience isn't that bad so far. (Which may be partly because there are bot too now, which I personally don't mind, but not evereonbody might likel that.)

Thx Ray. That might be a solition. I'm not looking forward for throwing away my tournaments-levels, but i'm not looking forward to abandon LG too - well, that includes the former. So this might be a good idea.

Which championships are due August 1st?

I heard from Richard the chamionchip tournaments will have less players per tournament from now on. I think thats an improvement.

And I had just settled on stepping down from some Championships, too! Now I have to deliberate on how many to take on all over again!

Also, for anyone still hesitant about Championship sizes, here's a list of February/August Championships:

Go (Hahn Point System)
Chess
Chess (Crazyhouse)
Tumbleweed (size 8)
Tumbleweed (size 11)
EWN (1 point)
EWN (7 points)
Draughts (International)
WYPS (German 8)
WYPS (French 14)
WYPS (Spanish 14)
TYPS (Slovak 5)
WYPS (Slovak 14)
WYPS (Russian 8)
WYPS (Russian 11)
TwixT PP (size 24)
Reversi (10x10)
Amazons
Four in a Row (6x7)
Four in a Row (10x10)
Dots and Boxes (6x6)
Lines of Action (Scrambled)
Lines of Action (Quick)
Lines fo Action (Black hole)
Havannah (size 10)
Havannah (size 7)
Slither (size 9)
Catchup (Random)
Polyomino (small)
OSKI (Italian)
Morelli (size 13)
Morelli (size 31)
QYPS (size 5)

I think that's everything.

It's strange that variants of the same game starts at the same date.

Is there any chance to change it? I don't want to play 50 games at once, and later play nothing, like now…

I again propose my idea of starting tournaments on the Xth Monday/Friday/Saturday of a given year (like the 7th and 33rd), so that with 26 start times variants of the same game will never start simultaneously. WYPS would be the only exception to this, but half its variants don't even have enough participants for Championships to occur.

These Championships do look more reasonable in size. 8-16 games each in the four I entered is far more manageable. I appreciate the change!

I Agree, oakmoss! I have 70 new games this month, i think thats a fair ampunt. Far better then the 150 or 250 in june and july.

Amount

@Oakmoss, thank you for your effort making that list, it is useful to see what championships will be starting at the beginning of the month

there is a tournament calender
https://docs.littlegolem.net/tournaments/calendar/

Super useful! Thank you Ralf

Hey, I'm back to less then 100 games! Cake is on me!

Looks like the championships that began today (October 1) are back to single round robin instead of double round robin.

Hi. Just noticed it too. Maybe we can go back to playing more games in parallel..

It was good idea to have double round robin in connect 6, as the black color has significant edge over white. I would prefer that we return to this format, not sure why it was reversed back just after 1 round of championships?

I didn't think Connect6 had much advantage for black, if any, given the single stone start, but I've admittedly not read up on it, so I'd be interested to look at any sources on the topic.

I speak for myself, of course, but I think getting modestly biased outcomes against specific individual players in tournaments because I happen to be playing the weaker side is well worth not being buried under in twice as many games, as long as the ratio of first/second player games is roughly even.

yeah, players are bound to play as each color roughly 50% of the time anyway.

I am grateful to hear that Ywixt, with an opening protocol that balances the game very well, will likely go back to a single game format. I hope Richard will apply the change selectively.

*Twixt