Playing them all
Hello readers, thanks for being here once again!
One information that was presented in my previous blog entry was that in 2024, until mid-April or so, there were slightly less than 4000 different teams that have been playing, or were still playing, daily matches. I was counting there all the teams that have started at least one match since the beginning of the year. Even if we consider some of the games from the previous years are still playing, it's safe to assume most of those are from very active teams and only marginally change the figures.
Some teams have been around for a very long time, and might have played against hundreds of other teams that might or might not have survived to tell their stories to this day. I can't really make an assumption about how many different teams those older clubs have played against, but for the clubs that are currently active, if I had to make a bet, I'd say that there's a handful that are playing against a wider spectrum of teams than others.
There's a simple reason for that: many of the most active clubs don't play against smaller clubs, for different reasons. One of those reasons is that some of those play almost exclusively league matches. Some play few matches, and only against team of comparable size or strength.
On the other hand, there's a few clubs actively seeking new challenges, rather than passively waiting for challenges to arrive or browsing occasionally the open seeks. I like the idea of proposing matches to smaller, newer, and/or less active teams that sometimes struggle to bring matches to their members. Of course, when coming from a bigger club, it's only fair if there's an effort made to calibrate the challenges in size and strength, and to try to balance the rosters before the match starts.
So here's a question: what is the team that played against the highest number of different teams? I suppose that might be material to write about in a future blog entry, as I haven't processed my data set in that sense yet. The information I have is, for now, only about one team, arguably two.
The team I know best today is, for obvious reasons, Promote to King. For reasons that are not less obvious, I have data about 5 For Fighting, but I stopped maintaining them. When I did, that club has played, or was still playing, with roughly 1900 different teams since it was created in July 2021. Promote to King, on the other hand, was created less than six months ago, on the 1st of January 2024. Since then, it successfully started registration phase of at least one match with 1085 different teams, and has started at least one match with 974 of those. As I write, it has active matches on-going with 751 unique teams.
531 teams have started 2 matches or more with Promote to King, 280 3 or more, 155 4 or more, 84 5 or more, as presented below:
Cumulated number of teams per number of matches with Promote to King
Now I want to present the teams that have been playing with P2K the ùost in those 5 first months. I want to add that those matches result either of challenges from P2K to the team, from challenges received, from open seeks, and could also be for most of them friendly matches but also league matches.
I want to thank a lot all the admins that are accepting to engage in matches, and I hope they appreciate the effort we make to bring standard games as well as thematic ones to a great number of players. I want to thank also warmly all the league managers who are working continuously to create a competitive environment in which hundreds of teams and thousand of players can play. Chess.com, despite the difficulty many of us are facing to manage our teams, is place filled with fantastic people, and most of the team admins and coordinators are volunteers spending countless hours for their club. Cheers to them.
For obvious readability reasons I can't present all of the teams below, so here's an extract of more than 40 teams that have been playing 6 matches or more. No doubt all that will change in the future.
(for clarity; "win"/"draw"/"lose" refers to P2K's results)
Teams having started 6 or more matches with Promote to King
Playing as many teams as possible is not an ultimate goal. There's two ideas behind it: the first, as explained, is to give opportunity to as many teams as possible to play in daily team matches in a fair environment. The other is to play a lot of matches (our players are hungry) while trying not to always challenge the same few teams, which can be annoying. I hope we are successful in both aspects so far.
Now it's up to you: do you want to join the fun? Join the team! You are an admin and want to play? Let's talk about it!
More updates will come as the club develops. See you all in matches!
