Tournament won't proceed correctly

This tournament "Team Slovakia Tournament - Chess960" has 4 players remaining and it's format is group size=5 with 2 to advance. What is does in every subsequent round, 2 groups of 2 players are created and all 4 players advance to the next round regardless of result. And so on. This has happened now in rounds 4, 5 and 6! and is bound to happen on and on. This is a bug in chess.com engine that obviously needs to be fixed.

Hi! The number of players does still seem to be dwindling down. The only reason round 4 and round 5 both had 4 players was due to all four scores being identical in round 4. 

i ve resigned both my games, because i wanted to know answer earlier... so. now the tournament is going correctly,but i am eliminated...

Is it not more logical if only one group of four is formed instead of two groups of two? This way, not only quicker would the tournament proceed, but also deadlocks of this type would be avoided.

After tarnowski dropped out of the tournament, it didn't get any better. Round 7 was formed with 2 groups again, group 1 having a single player (!!!). What are we supposed to do?

Can someone address this issue? Tournament having started with 17 players is in its 7th round (!!) and I'm playing the same player for the fourth consecutive round in the group of 2 people...?!

it seems no... unfortunately, you should answer it by yourself...

Hi, I'll try to explain what seems to have happened.  Looking through some old forum posts I found this thread that references a similar situation to the tournament you are participating in: (Post 4) (http://www.chess.com/forum/view/suggestions/tournament-bug-should-be-1-group).  

What happens is that in any round where the largest group is smaller than the maximum number of players set in the tournament settings, then the maximum group size is reset to the current largest group size.  

In your tournament, the settings say that the maximum group size is 5.  Starting Round 2 there were 8 players remaining, so two groups of 4 were created.  Since the largest group in Round 2 was 4 players, the new maximum group size was reset to 4.  So even though Round 3 had 5 players, because the new maximum group size became 4, a group of 3 and a group of 2 were created.

This happens again in your tournament before Round 6.  Since the largest group in Round 4 (and in Round 5) was 2 players, then the maximum group size for Round 6 is also 2 players.  So even though you only have 3 players left, all 3 cannot be in the same group because the maximum group size has been reset to 2.  

I found this same situation in a few other recently completed tournaments.  For example, in this tournament the settings were for groups of 6, but Round 5 has two groups of 3 because Round 4 had a largest group size of 5.  (http://www.chess.com/tournament/huge-tournament)

I'm sorry that doesn't solve your problem, the tournament will likely keep going until one more person is eliminated then you will have a final round.  Hopefully this explains what's going on though to you and anyone else who was wondering.  If any of that does not make sense please let me know and I'll try to reexplain it a different way.  Or if any staff has a different explanation please let us know!

Thanks for you thorough explanation! But I keep on wondering:

1/ how is this tournament going to end, given that group size is now 2 and number of advancing players has been 2 from the start, or hasn't it?; isn't that an infinite loop?

2/ why have this totally non-intuitive and irritating behavior? Is it a feature or a bug? Surely looks like a bug to me.

Your welcome.  For #1, the largest group cannot have more than half of its players advance unless there are ties.  So in your tournament, if both players keep drawing both matches, or each player wins once, then the tournament will keep going indefinitely until there is a decisive result.  If one player wins twice, or there is a win and a draw, then the other player will be eliminated and the final round can start.  Another example would be if a tournament had groups of 6 with 3 players advancing, but a later round had two groups of 4, then the site would only advance the top 2 players from each group (except for ties) because 3 would be more than half the group.  It would be helpful if this was posted somewhere to eliminate confusion.  Maybe the "pairings" screen could have a notice showing the new group sizes and the new number of players advancing when it is different from the tournament presets.

For #2, looking around it seems that it has been this way for quite a few years, maybe from when the site was created.  Arguments could be made for each side for how it should work, though I would argue that this can significantly add to the length of tournaments and the maximum group size should remain at what it was set to before the tournament, regardless of previous rounds.  If I was playing in your tournament I would have thought that Round 3 was going to be the final round, there was really no need for you to have to keep going all the way to at least Round 8, maybe more.  It's been this way for some time now so there is either a programming problem where the groups have to decrease in size, or there are more arguments for the current system than I have been able to think of.  Regardless of the reason for how you ended up where you are, good luck to you, I hope the tournament ends soon!

Hi guys, I've let our team know about the issue. If I hear any news on it I'll let you know as soon as possible!

OK thanks. It would be nice if this tournament could be reset so that the last round be played with all 3 remaining players present; if not possible then I guess we'll just have to play through it.