Here's an idea. If you're anything like me, you spend a lot of time checking your larger tournaments to see when (if ever) the round will be over. With all these vacationers and foot draggers, it seems like a single round could draw on for months.

Now, I'm not knocking the vacation system. Though, it wouldn't be amiss to say that the system is being abused. But that's another topic for another time (post forum links).

For the more hardcore chess.com player, those who have chess.com as a home page, those who reload the screen (just in case the auto-refrech doesn't work), those who plan their schedule around when their opponents are online (you've all done it), wouldn't it be nice to have at least some idea of when the round will end?

Here's the idea. If one were to plot a graph of games remaining versus the date, it's not hard to visualize the result. The right half of a bell curve would able to give us an increasingly good idea of the end date. The climax would be set at the start date, as games gradually ended the height (y-coordinate) would drop off. The most dramatic drop would occur between the start and end date (indicating the average game length). And, though theoretically the graph never intercepts the x-axis, when the graph got to be below one game remaining, the end date the round could be predicted. (Note: A large tournament would be necessary to account for outliers. A minimum 100-200 players playing 400-800 games might cover it. Of course, it would work better with more players and games. The minimums would have to be experimented with.)

Ok, lots of jargon i know, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution if you're confused.

Perhaps a site director could write a simple program for the site as a quick way to predict a round's end date.

Comments?

:) Good post and idea and heh yep..ive done all the things ye have said heh, nice to know there are a bunch of us equally addicted to chess.com ;)

haha. that IS interesting. go for it if you like :) i'd love to see the results.

Is this the chess.com equivalent of the kids asking "Are we there yet?"

As a shameless -- and unfortunately uncompensated -- plug for chess.com, there really is a bunch of content on this site. You can certainly fill your time waiting for the next move from the guy who's in the Bahamas sipping a Corona and trying to impress the ladies with his witty chess banter. 

That is totally genius, lol I'd never have thought of that. I think that sounds like a far better system than the one currently in place... if it works.

This idea sucks, and I refuse to believe that it works untill I see it do so.
This is just another crazy idea thought up by someone with too much time on their hands...probably because they live in the woods.

Seems like civil unrest is about to erupt in Newfoundland.

Duffer1965 wrote: Seems like civil unrest is about to erupt in Newfoundland.

---

bahahah too funny...he's a friend

leggy wrote: Duffer1965 wrote: Seems like civil unrest is about to erupt in Newfoundland.

---

bahahah too funny...he's a friend

---

Darn. I was hoping we'd have something to watch on CNN besides the presidential race and the war in Iraq. But you can't have everything.