First of all let me say CONGRATULATIONS to Luke and JC who came away with first and second places respectively in our first ever club chess.com tournaments. The event was a blitz tournament held on Friday night May 8, 2020.

Now, on to business. I can create Live Tournaments in the chess club tools here. These tournaments can be at any of the live speeds, from 30 seconds to over an hour per player and I can do custom time controls and Fischer time is also possible. I can set them up well in advance but they cannot be joined until an hour before the start time. However, since the event starts as soon as the set time arrives and subsequent rounds start as soon as pairing is possible (and said pairing is automatic) it is advisable that if you want to play you should plan to be here at the beginning and throughout. The number of rounds is determined at a max by me and then that number is reduced by the system based on the number of players available as the tournament progresses. So, if I set the rounds at say 6 but not enough people show up to start it will shift that down, if more people are added it will not increase the number of rounds but if players leave it will decrease the number of rounds.

I am wondering then how everyone wants to handle tournaments. Would you all like to have a weekly 10 minute per player blitz tournament starting at say 8:30 each Friday night as long as we cannot have our in person meetings? Would you prefer to have a different time control each week? Would anyone like to try something longer first, say have the next one be 25 minute time controls but start at 7:45 and run until 10:15 or 11:05 depending on rounds? Would everyone like a faster control say two 5 minute events running back to back? Or would you prefer to do something faster on Friday nights and then try to do say weekly tournaments on Saturdays starting earlier in the day but running with say Fischer controls of 45 minutes with a 45 second return?

I can also do it differently still, through my personal account I can set up tournaments that are considered dailies. In this format I set up a number of slots, say 16, and the tournament is divided into 4 groups of 4. Each groups plays games with time controls set as 1 to 3 days per move based on my choice The groups play off until a winner emerges from each and then they are repaired into a new round comprised of those who advanced from their first group and so on until we finally have an overall winner. I can run this at the same time as the other formats above as well. But only if there is enough interest.

We can also consider, at some point, looking into matches against other clubs and even vote chess against other clubs. I'd love to get your thoughts on the tournaments first and then on if anyone would be interested in investigating these other group options.

Danville Chess Club

Super Admins