The Grandmaster Invitational
In my last article, I mentioned how last year me and my friends started a chess discord server.In this discord server, you could earn special titles. These titles denoted not only your skill level, but also the level of power you had in the server. These titles were very important to us. In this article I’ll give a breakdown of how our discord functioned. Do with it what you will.
When you first join the server, you aren’t given any rank. You have to start playing other people on the server to work your way up the ladder. The first role that can be given is master. Master is given to people who are active in the server and show a love of chess. The masters didn’t gain any special privileges. The rank above master was International Master. This is where it starts to get interesting.
The only way that someone could become an International Master was if they were already a master and were selected for promotion by a Grandmaster. At any given time, there could be a max of four IMs. International Masters were people who showed skill and promise at the game of chess. International Masters had the ability to promote people to master, but the most important part of being an IM was the Grandmaster Invitational.
The Grandmaster Invitational was an event we held about every two months. All International Masters were invited to compete in the Invitational, and winning one was the only path to becoming a Grandmaster. As the founder of the server and the original Grandmaster, it was my job to come up with the format, and I definitely had a lot of fun with it.
The Grandmaster Invitational consisted of four trials, the first one being the puzzle challenge. In this trial, each of the four competing IMs would do a five minute puzzle rush. Each competitor would try to successfully complete as many puzzles as he or she could, and the person with the lowest score was eliminated from the competition.
The second trial was the accuracy test. The remaining three competitors would play one game against the 1300 level bot. After the match they would run an analysis on their game. The player with the lowest accuracy would be eliminated from the competition. The player with the highest accuracy would gain an advantage in the final round.
The penultimate trial was the simplest of them all. The final two IMs would play each other in a best out of three match. The player who won the advantage in the previous round would start at white for the first game, and the players would alternate each game. As you can guess, the loser of these matches was eliminated, and even though the other International Master was the last man standing, they had not won the Invitational yet. They still had to face the Grandmaster Gauntlet.
When the final International Master had reached the Gauntlet, the Grandmasters would choose one from among ourselves to play him or her. We would play a single match, and if the IM won, they would be immediately named a Grandmaster. If the IM lost, the Grandmasters would discuss how they played, and would decide if they deserved to be a Grandmaster. If they decided he or she was worthy, they would be named Grandmaster and everyone would be happy.
I don’t know why I didn’t just have them play tournament style to decide the winner. That probably would have made more sense, but I guess I just liked the theatrics. I think that’s one of the reasons why I love writing this blog. I like to explore the other side of chess. Not the strategic, black and white, cold side of chess, but the dramatic, fun, and beautiful, theatrical side of chess. Chess in its essence is two people playing a war game, and I think it’s more fun when you look at it like that.
So in conclusion, have fun with your chess. Make a server with your friends. Give each other titles and have big, game-show style competitions. Play chess like the game it is. Or don’t, if that’s not your thing. Play chess however it makes you happiest, for is that not the point of all games?
