Considering the Summer Olympics are coming up, I think it would be a great idea to have a chess tournament featuring only the top rated players from each country.  Even tho I couldn't possibly compete in it, I would love to follow the results.

Originally I was thinking that in the 1st round the groups would be divided into countries with the winner of each group going on to represent their country in the subsequent rounds.  But since there are 223 possible choices on the countries list, even one player from each country would make for one really big tournament.  (BTW... forgive my American ignorance, but why is England, Great Britain, and the United Kingdom all listed separately?  Aren't they synonymous?)

I am still too chicken to join any tournament yet, and would have no idea how to start one, so I am basically just throwing this idea out to the Chess.com gods for consideration.  I don't know if you would want to make it by invitation only, and only invite the top player from each country (but then ratings change so that person could change from day to day), or make it so that only players in the top five or ten from their country are allowed to sign up, or whatever.  I don't know if a tournament can even be set up with 223 players, or if many countries would simply not make the cut, or whatever.  You understand the possibilities much better than I, but I would LOVE to see this one play out, however it plays out.

Interesting idea...tournament by countries....Maybe you could have it broke down into 5 players in a group all from the same country.

Start with mini tournaments for each country group to get the top 5 winners from each country

then the top 5 would move on to the final round or something like that.

That way you could have it open to everyone that wants to play and then you would have teams

instead of single players.

It would definitley take some organizing and input from others to come up with 

the best way to organize it.