"Good practice rules" for Team-based Vote Chess

I get very frustrated by juvenile Vote Chess, where people simply vote without any discussion or rationale for a move.

So I have devised some "Good practice rules" for Vote Chess

These rules cannot be enforced, but they make for a more effective Vote Chess

Rule 1:  No team member should vote until the last 12hrs in order to ensure proper discussion, or when the flag goes up for the Team-sanctioned vote.

Rule 2: If people do not participate in the Team discussion, they should abstain from voting

Rule 3: When people make a suggestion for the "next move", they should provide a continuation for the next 2-4 moves for both white and black. Otherwise, it is simply a fancy when we need substantive arguments. GMs do not simply consider "the next move"

Rule 4: I f the Team Leader is merely administering the team and not fostering discussion among Team members, and hence fostrering intra-team learning - the essential purpose of "Vote Chess" - then he/she is not a "Team-based" leader . Ask for a real Team Leader (not an Administrator) or resign from the mob. A "team" where everyone votes independently is a rabble or mob, NOT a Team.

There is an even worse "non chatting and just voting player". In one of the groups Im in there is a guy who post his move idea (without any comments): Rb2

He has a relative who also comes in every move and posts the same move in the comments: Rb2!

Even when others have discussed Rb2 after the first post and pointed out it was a bad move... When only about 10 people are voting this is an annoying 'block of votes' to overcome. In my mind I call the other guy his minion :)

You can have good rules about voting in vote chess AND enforce them.

One way is to have a team captain who will warn or ban anyone who breaks the rules. 

You would need a set of vote chess rules and give the penalty for not following the rules.

A good vote chess team will be disciplined.  Also a good vote chess team will have members not only discussing moves but using diagrams for possible continuations.

The vote chess team I used to be a part of [Ponziani Power] had a captain for several months until finally the voters were  following the rules and then the captain was no longer needed.

[Estragon, you might look at the team discussion of Ponziani Power to see what I mean?]

I do not get this "rules cannot be enforced" Why not? If someone insists on sabotaging a vote chess game by not following the rules give warning and then kick him out of the group?  Why let one or two or three selfish individuals ruin the game for others?

I have played with several Vote Chess groups and Admin of a couple of these teams.

If the SA - Super Admin creates rules on how to play Vote Chess in the group then it works. It works great. I learned so much about a few openings i did not know before. In addition i learned something about End Game that i thought was true.

In some groups they do not have rules and have no problem. I think these random members that join a Vote Chess no which group they can random vote a move.

How to fix it. Well if the group is organized with or without rules they can not control the vote. I learned that from a couple of SA here at chess.com. Plus if you have enough base Vote Chess players that are good at Vote Chess consistantly playing all the Vote Chess games it does not matter if they randomly vote for a move.

On sabotage! First you have to warn them during the game. Inform them how the group they currently joined plays Vote Chess. Then and only then if they continue you can then call it sabotage as they were warned. Then i suggest you continue to do the right thing an inform the SA of the group about this issue. If your the SA well.....  do what you have to do!

Are you talking about 50 members that are active in the game or 50 that joined the Vote Chess match. There is a difference. I have yet to see a team that had 50 players active almost each move. About 20-30 is what i think i have seen but those days have passed as your lucky to get 5-10 voting in a game.

If your the SA or Admin of the group you have all kinds of ways of finding out who voted what move. It may take a whil but you can find out.

The rule about participating in the discussion goes against a part of online asynchronous discussion advantages.  I wait to vote for a reason...so that I can read the discussions.  Most of the time, my thoughts have already been voiced (both when I'm right and when I'm not so right), so I can vote based on what others have said.  So, for me to "add" to the discussion would not actually be adding anything.  I would say that Rule 2 should be changed to something more along the lines of not voting without being aware of the discussion.

That is a noble intention, but non-enforcable by the moderator, of course.  Perhaps the best solution is to limit your Vote Chess games to small groups of known people.  Unfortunately, from a practical standpoint, small groups seldom have those strong players who lend the better insights into a position.

When I play in Vote Chess games, I follow book opening lines and in my comments list continuations from GM games in my database(s).  That usually elicits response from other team members and a useful discussion ensues.  Once that interaction is established, it usually continues throughout the match.  It only takes one troll to turn serious players off.

That works for the large teams and very sound method.

But when you have several players in the group with Vote Chess experience discussion may not be needed until key moves. In which case one person post the move to be played and if within 6 hours(wait for others to be online) the group votes for that move.

Discussion is not thkey when the group has certain openings they play so everybody is on the same page automatically and pretty much knows how the other members will analyze the situation after a couple of games playing together.

I have say your a great Vote Chess player as every good group needs a few players that wait patiently before picking their vote until everybody has had time to post their approach to the current situation.

One way to solve this is to use weighting votes. For example a vote with wight 5 is counted as 5 votes. A vote with weight of .85 is counted as ,85 vote.

But I have difficult time of finding a mthod how a vote is weighted.

1. If the weight is in the center and deviation 50, then persons with rating +/- 0 to 50 points from average team rating just before a team makes a move are given weight of 5. Persons with rating +/- 50 to 100 are given weight of 4, etc.

2. If the weight is shifted to the right, then the highest rating member is given weight of 6. Person with second highest rating and rating - 0 to 50 points from the highest are given weight of 5. etc.

3. Other weighting methods.

Before a Vote Chess is begun, admin who creates the game has to decide which weighting method is used and announce to participants.

In that situation you need a respected player to lead the vote chess group. We lost a couple of them here. CaptJimTKirk i have to say was the best at this and no longer active in Vote Chess. He would post thes wait until "      " says it is  time to vote.

I think the current problem is the new players that have joined chess.com have no respect at all. Not saying it is the majority of them but just a few. I heard some of these new members are from when chess.com hooked up with facebook.

That seems to defeat the purpose of vote chess... if it merely becomes a few higher rated players deciding everything there woudln't be much discussion and mutual learning.

Did you read till the end? It says "Before a Vote Chess is begun, admin who creates the game has to decide which weighting method is used and announce to participants."

Maybe the creator doesn't use a weighting method at all if he/ she opts.

Before chess.com started cleaning house we had several small teams that had good VC players. And several of the main players that remain have gone quiet. The problem was nobody stepped in to fill the shoes of those Vote Chess players that are no longer with us.

Have to say the book opening thing works if the leader of the group has a rank 0f 1500+ ("Capt...KIrk"). I prefer 1900+ for a fighting chance to win. When that player leads them with strong moves they will follow it is just that simple. The ability to pick the best move among good moves is key even when using a database.

Really it comes down to do they respect the person creates the rules for the group. I mean respect as person and player.

In one of my VC groups, the stronger player seldom jumps in right away.  Weaker players make suggestions which then becomes a topic of discussion.  Ultimately, if a strong player is a group participant, why would (s)he not point out reasons for weak moves, and then why would a group choose moves that were not the best of group consensus?  I don't know of any way that a good player would stay engaged if (s)he were forced to deal with bad moves and resulting positional errors.

So the option to use it counters the point I made somehow?  The cure is worse than the disease whether it's optional or not.

That is most likely worked out by making that Strong player an Admin of the group and declare that person Captain of the Vote Chess games. That usual gets half of them in place real  quick.

If the opponent players are below 1900 rank is not a major factor. Example "Captain....KIrk" As if he was the leader and the other group made a mistake in the opening .....game over. Yes he did use a database but is good with it. I have to add you can not just invite anybody to the group. That would be where the problem really has to looked at here. The SA or Admin has to invite players to group that respect them and any new Admin that join the group. If not then that is not the type of member you wish to have in the group.

Note not every strong player likes to get involved in VC games.... they can avoid arguements.

In the very strong vote chess game [Ponziani Power] we were not allowed to vote in the first 24 hours unless it was a forced move or very obvious move.

We also did not just follow book [in this case the book I coauthored-Play the Ponziani] After the book was published I found a host of new ideas so even if a move was in my book or even if it was grandmaster theory--we did not authomatically play that move--we looked for something better and often found something better.

Our discussion would start right away and by the time the first 24 hours was up we often had found what we thought was the best move.

However if there were still 2 or more candidate moves we woud continue the discussion until one move was decided.  and then we would vote.

If when only 12 hours left to vote and we still had not come up with a agreed move--then we would vote from 1 or 2 or 3 candidate moves.  This rarely happened. Once one player was trying to make a point and would not agree to the consensus and was out voted by 8 to 1.

We plainly printed our vote chess rules and there was a penalty for not following the rules-usually a  warning/reminder and later if the person delibertly breaks the rules again he/she was out of the vote chess.

It is quite possible we had more discussion each move than almost any other vote chess team. [the results mirrored this discipline]

The vote chess was enlightening for all as the reasons for and against certain moves were given. Also we used a lot of diagrams. If we thought a move good we would diagram it out to several moves.

If we thought an idea or move bad-we would show this via diagrams. 

At first we had a captain to enforce the rules  but later with experience everybody was following the rules and no team captain needed.

If you want success in vote chess you will make some rules and make sure the rules are followed and then have lots of discussion.

That was the method The Power of Chess used in Vote Chess.

Have we been on the same VC team?

Only a handful of groups used that method and it was consistently used by certain players here.