New Suggestion: Odds Teams Chess

Usually, when playing a teams game, a player with a low Teams rating will receive a strong player as his teammate to make games more balanced, like in this one I played:

https://www.chess.com/4-player-chess?g=9299237

However, if you don’t get a strong player as a teammate, the game could be too unbalanced and not fair, like this one I played.

https://www.chess.com/4-player-chess?g=9371194

From the second link, I was inspired to suggest “odds teams chess”. This is a game where one team receives odds (like the enemy players starting the game missing some material to compensate for the rating gap). Possible odds could be:

• The team with the weaker players having a development advantage (e.g. 2 moves, 4 moves, or 6 moves played).
• Having draw odds — a draw counts as a win for the weaker players
• Material odds (like the stronger players missing a rook, both rooks, or a queen, etc.)

or you could just play a certain rating restriction? 2000+ games will be guaranteed to give you a decent partner. Also, how would the system work to make these "odds" work? No one knows who will join a queue and which color they will be.

Well, that I get, but one time my teammate resigned when we just started.

I don’t think that odds teams chess will be possible though, but we can see.

Well, if one team started with less material or a development disadvantage, this would have been a fair way to play so that the weaker players have a better chance of winning.

We could use the system of odds chess autobalance.

Enter @Sean3139

You can already do this by playing a custom position (unrated game). We cannot keep adding ratings for every small variation we can think of because the # of separate ratings just becomes overwhelming and meaningless, so I don't think we would have such a game mode be rated. 4PC also gets a lot of good chess players who are casually checking it out for a day but are very strong at tactics and can pick up 4PC quite quickly within a few games, so oftentimes rating especially at the lower levels is not such a useful metric for how well people are playing.

Once you pick up a bit of rating yourself, I suggest limiting yourself to 1550+ or 1600+ rated  teams queues; there is a large number of players who are checking out 4PC for the first time, enter their first game, and sit there blankly staring at their screen unsure what to make of it and not moving. If you limit your queue just a little bit in this way, at least you can eliminate the frustration of getting paired up over and over with confused fresh arrivals : )

Yes, it’s clear, but what if you don’t know the pairings?

Maybe a good idea. This would have to either be only casual or have it's own rating category though

This should be casual.

I think Teams bullet and variants games have very different ratings between the teams. Even though rating is not everything, I think it usually does represent the actual strength, and the team with the weaker players should have more material, extra tempi, or other odds to get better fighting chances.

To determine odds, we determine the average rating of the players on each team. Then we find the odds that would be the best based on the rating imbalance.