Back at work work:) Freestyle KO & Running Fischer Random in general

I got home Sunday (Jan 5) late night from Charlotte, NC, where I was fortunate to be part of the arbiter team of the 2025 PanAms organized by the Charlotte Chess Center! Read my reflections here, here and here!

Back at work on Monday and I got asked to be part of the game operations team on Tuesday, Jan 7, for the first day of the Freestyle Play-in KO Part. Of course I said yes: being part of a fun event is always exciting, I like keeping in touch with the titled players and always great to be part of the gameops team.

For those of you who are hearing about this event the first time, here is the quick rundown:

Freestyle Chess is organizing five, in person events as part of their 2025 Grand Slam Tour. Most of the players are invited already, but one spot is up for grabs and Chess.com announced a partnership that we will be hosting a multi-step qualification path to determine who gets the last spot.

First event is in February, so the qualifiers were held Jan 4-8. 
Details are on the events page.

• Jan 4-5: Two qualifiers for the non-titled community —> Top 3 players of each event (total of 6) were eligible to play in the next stage.
• Jan 6: Swiss stage: titled players competed in the usual format (similar to TT, 11 rounds of 3+2) —> top 4 players were eligible to enter the Knockout stage.
• Jan 7-8: Knockout stage: 12 invited players + top 4 from the playing were doing a single elimination KO. I was part of the game operations team on the first day, when they had 16 players - 8 matches simultaneously.

The format of these KOs are similar to what we had before (CCT, other community events), and nowadays very routine to us since we’ve been doing it for a good 2-3 years: each match in the KO rounds is a 2- or 4-game match, with possible Armageddon.
The gameops team and the tools have evolved (kudos to Simon and Alex for their amazing google sheet work!!) and also communication between the gameops and broadcast is very familiar by now.

But this was just a tad bit different, which of course made it both challenging and exciting!
The difference came from the fact that it was of course Fischer Random Chess, the famous Chess960, or nowadays goes by Freestyle Chess.

In this variant, the players play a non-traditional initial position. In-person or online, these positions selected by a random number generator that correlates to a specific position of the possible 960 variations. Read more about it here. Once the position is revealed, the players typically have a few minutes to think and analyze the position before they start their game.

In OTB events, it's the arbiter's job to draw the position. Usually then the position is projected to a place where all players can see it. Players set up the position, and are given a few minutes to analyze in their heads. During this time, the arbiter(s) go through the boards, and double check If the setups are correct. After a specified time, the round starts, and after that it's just a normal round, with of course paying attention to some of the tricky parts of moves, and rules associated with them, such as castling in Chess960.

Making Chess960 work in an online event:

1. We split the 16 players into two breakout rooms: upper half and the lower half of the bracket. I was assigned to the lower half with my colleague, Alex K, while Simon and Sotiris took the upper half. We knew that the upper half will start first, and we will be following them after 3 minutes stagger. This gives the broadcast to cover the start of the games a bit more equally, and better.
   
   
2. Alex and I have discussed how we split the work at hand: reminding the players of the format and details; displaying the position via one of us' shared screen, starting the timer (3 minutes in this event) so that players can keep track of the analysis time; and finally starting the games.
   
   
3. The position selection was done through a random number generator that was embedded into the google sheet. Since the other breakout room started first, it was Simon's job to click that, and he grabbed the FEN code of the selected position. (note: FEN code is a single line of text using ASCII codes, describing one specific position.)
   
   
4. The position was shared among the gameops team, and it was loaded to a viewer, actually two viewer side by side so that players can select which side they want to look at the board, black or white.
   
   
5. First broadcast room started the reveal of the selected position via screen share - starting the 3-minutes timer for the analysis, and a few minutes later, we followed as well. Of course we made sure that all 8 players could see the staff's shared screen, which is often harder to locate than one would think, since there are 8 other players sharing their screen as well for fair play purposes.
   
   
6. When the time was up, we started the games, the first ones were 15+2 time control. We had 8 players in our room, total of 4 matches, I got assigned to match E and F in our results bracket.
7. After the first game, players had to wait until all matches finished their first game. Short break, and then we started it again: random number generator, FEN code grab, position reveal, 3 minutes analyzing, and starting the second game, still 15+2 time control.
   
   
8. If after the first game it was a tie, the players went into another 2-game match, with slightly shorter time control, 5+2, before they had to face an Armageddon if still tied. My matches never got to Armageddon, only Vidit and Pragg had to play the second 2-game match, but since that was decisive, no need for Arma.
   
   
9. Small technical detail that the scores that you see in the broadcast is directly feeding from the google sheet that we are working with. So it's important to update that google sheet as fast as we can after the players are finished, so that you - the viewers - can see the results on the broadcast fast!

The Armageddon -- How does the time bidding work in practice?

When players are tied in a match, there comes a time when they have to do an Armageddon and decide who'll win the match. Chess.com has this fun practice of not doing the simple 4min vs 5-mins game, but players can bid for their time to pick the color (aka 99% times to pick black).

How does this work in reality over zoom?

• We announce the rules - which of course players have heard many times, but we do it anyway, clearly, and remind them that if their bid is the lower, they MUST play with that time, and the other player plays with the full amount base time. Usually it's the same min base time as the last game they played (so 5 minutes in case of this event), always no increment, and the games are of course non-rated on chess.com since it's different clock times.
• Players make their bids via private message to us, game operators.
• Once they both made their bid, we announce both times, announce who won the bid. That player will state which color they want to be with, of course keeping in mind that black has drawing odds (meaning they only need a draw to win the match.)
• We usually start the armageddon game a few minutes later: after adding this information to the google sheet to set up the match commands that we start the games with, as well as for broadcast to also have this information.

Hope you enjoyed the sneak peak into our behind the scene arbiter gameops work for these online events Chess.com is organizing. I'm so grateful to be part of such exciting events with a great group of people, and yes, seeing and listening to Wesley's jokes is always a plus that I look forward to every time I have him in my breakout room!