Are you willing to wait longer for matches with narrower rating ranges for pairings?

Hey Bughousers! 

We are thinking of narrowing the rating range you get for random pool matches. But that will mean that you won't get matched quite a quickly as you do currently. 

Currently, there is no restriction for the range of players you may be paired with. We attempt to pair you with someone closely rated but if none available, we don't wait and just pair you with the first players we can find.  

Right now, There are about 5 matches per minute starting on Chess.com which is a very very very tiny fraction of the total games being played Chess.com. But is enough to make you not generally have to wait to long to get a game of some kind.

But if we added rating restrictions, that could make the pool very small very fast and up the wait times a lot. 

So... How long are willing to wait? and what kind of rating range would you like to see? 

It could help to have a list of partnered players. This would allow you to personally challange a team with your team or enter the general pool with a solo Q or team Q into the solo.
Partner List
Personalize challange of your pre made team vs their pre made team
General Pool Q with either your pre made team or solo

Can't you let the player select the range?  I know some times I would like to play against really good people and other times I would rather play an even game.  Can't there be a page of open seeks?  Thanks for making chess.com awesome! 

One idea: start the range narrow but widen it over time.  For example, have a 600-point range initially (+- 300 points).  After 30 seconds, widen it by 100 points in both directions (+- 400 points).  After another 30 seconds, widen by another 100 points in both directions.  After two minutes, remove the rating restriction completely and just take the first match.

Alternatively, start the range narrow but give a button to widen/remove the rating range.  Of course, this would only apply to the current open seek.

Another idea, which would work very will with the button to widen/remove your rating range: show a list of current open seeks - ideally including their active rating ranges.  For example, an 1800 player creates a seek.  He sees other seeks from players rated 1100, 1500, and 1900, all of which have a +- 300 point range.  Thus, he knows with his current +- 300 range that he'd be fine with two of those players, but the 1100 is out of range, and the 1500 out of range for the 1900.  Then the 1900 player widens his range to +-800; if the other players see this and decide to widen their ranges, the pairing will be made.  If, however, the 1100 player is scared this will get him trounced, he'll keep his range narrower and avoid the pairing, and the other three will get paired with the next seek to come along while the 1100 waits a little longer for a game more at his level.

We are already doing the ever-widening net. I suppose we could just adjust how long it waits to jump to the next ring of ratings. 

Good Idea!

In that case, then, other than fine-tuning the automatic adjustments, might be to display information on what other seeks are out there and allow you to adjust your net accordingly.  That way, if there's sufficient seeks just outside your range, you can say "close enough" and push a button and get an immediate game, but if the other seeks are farther away, you can decide to wait - and, based on how many seeks are in range, you can get a rough idea of how long you might have to wait.

The main priority is to have a minimum points gained choice added. I would be happy to avoid playing for less than 3 points, not because I want to maximize my rating but because the games are way too uneven most of the times and therefore very boring.

I actually prefer current system and I am not in favoring of changing it even if it can be very frustrating to play with someone who have almost 600 points lower rating than myself.

The current system, you get partnered with someone 1200 points above you and then they immediately resign.  So you have to do another seek.  After 3-4 of these you just stop trying to play bughouse on this site.  Changing it so your partner is within 100 points of you even if you have to wait a while would be much better.

100 is far too tight; there aren't enough people active in bughouse to find four players within 100 points of each other. 

You would probably regularly wait an hour or more for a game if we required that. 

I don't understand.  I have tried to play bughouse a number of times and have never once found a game, nor have I seen one in the match finder.  My method is I go to live games and select bug house 5min click play game.  Am I doing something wrong?  I would love to try bughouse.

Have a list of partnered teams. They can challenge each other or take their partnership into the general pool.
If you are Solo and dont have your Chewbacca then you can enter the general Q like it is now.

My fear is that the solo Q pool will have an insufferably long wait if you apply any more restrictions on the small pool of players.

You need to try 3 minutes games. Not enough people to support playing more than 1 time control. 

I like getting matches quickly.  But it is frustrating to have people resign on move 1 a lot because they don't like the matchup.

The ever widening net seems like a good approach.  Maybe adjust the time for the widening.  Or maybe let people set a limit (like +-400), but please make such a limit optional (and preferably opt-in) because I wouldn't choose any limit -- I'll play anyone and I like getting matches fast.

Perhaps the live server should display a warning if you create a seek other than for 3 minutes letting you know that you may have to wait a very long time to find a match?

A big thing that would help would be to increase the number of people playing bughouse.  Adding tournaments and having a highly-publicised event similar to the Crazyhouse championships would help with that a lot.

We have some tech hurdles before we can do tournaments but that is the plan. 

Do you have a very rough idea of when that's likely to happen?  Six months, a year, two years?  Or is it impossible to say at this point?