Discussion on future season(s) of Thematic Endgames: rated or unrated?

You still want good pairings for people even unrated. So 2 divisions as usual. I play some people unrated that I know and I just play the same as rated. Just because games are unrated doesn’t mean you don’t care about pairings and how you play.

Just trying to fit everything in the calandar without having too many sections.

I see the following solutions:

1. 4 divisions: open, U1400, both rated and unrated. Teams can register to all. 
2. Original proposition : Open and U1400 rated, U1600 unrated. 
3. Only rated. 
4. Only unrated. 

If we go for 1, I'll have all the sections of same raring category starting the same day with the same positions. That's probably the simplest.

What I can't know in advance is if there will be enough teams in each of the four sections.

Why not just alternate seasons between rated and unrated. This one is unrated and next rated.

For We are one team, I would register the team in open unrated section for scenario 1 and 4. I would not register the team for scenario 2 and 3.

Under 1600 is too high for low rated players

The result of the discussion we are having now is that some teams will play exclusively either rated, or unrated. It seems most do not really care, or haven't expressed their opinion. Considering the number of Registrations in S1, it's guaranteed to have a number of teams, but it's totally unknown for a full unrated season.

I am for having it unrated. And chess.com should have a different rating category for these types of games.

Also more club members will join matches like these, if unrated.

What about the pace? Those are shorter games by essence, does it makes sense to reduce the interval between matches to e.g. 2 weeks? Should it be 4? First season had 3 weeks, first season for openings had 2 a'd second will have 4.

The pace should be, whatever balances out your workload, with the other tournaments, the best.

Once a month. Most clubs have many other matches to work around

I'd recommend you do unrated for anything that involves custom positions.

Doing rated for custom positions can cause the games to bug out as you can see here: https://www.chess.com/club/matches/strictly-bible/1615105

Even though the exact same position works fine in unrated, as you can see here:

https://www.chess.com/club/matches/strictly-bible/1617821

Based on the results of your league, it seems that either it's been patched or rated custom positions can still work in some circumstances (but not all).

But unless you know what those circumstances are, I'd advise steering clear. You don't want to get unlucky and find yourself in a match where all moves are illegal.

We know exactly what causes this bug: it's wrong formatting of the input FEN. In your first example, only the position part of the FEN was present, missing the info about castling, move count, who is to move, etc. It's not a matter of rated or not. Looking at your matches on the API, we can see the following:

• First FEN: initial_setup": "bbbbkbbb/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/BBBBKBBB"
• Second FEN: "initial_setup": "bbbbkbbb/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/BBBBKBBB w - - 0 1"

The bug is that the matches shouldn't be accepted by the system at challenge time. Devs are aware, maybe it will be fixed some day. But in the meantime, the challenge form now properly displays the custom position, and we will also be more attentive to created match to detect wrong setup when we can.

I thought that initially, but I tested the same match with castling information included and that didn't work either.

I'll find the link.

https://www.chess.com/club/matches/strictly-bible/1617461

Extra space before the FEN is also an issue. That was a problem in the 3 corrupted matches of our Thematic Endgames. Here:

"initial_setup": " bbbbkbbb/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/BBBBKBBB w - - 1 1",

Okay maybe it does work like that.

I'll probably test that later on. Not immediately, but I'll try when I think we could do with another match.

Are you okay with me challenging one of your clubs to test it?

(i.e. I'll try sending a rated match with the correct FEN.)

Of course. But please let's not continue that here, it's off-topic.