Questions, suggestions and ideas

Feedback: The two "reference dummy matches" created for Round 1 of Season 1 of the Thematic Openings competition are outstanding!

That was a great suggestion!

I agree. Well done!

I just took a closer look at the distribution of openings in Season 1 of the thematic team match competitions (OPEN and UNDER 1400). In both competitions, the "Open" and "Semi-Open" games are all located in the first 3 or 4 rounds. Then the remaining rounds consist of "Closed" games.

One of my clubs (FanatikClub) has been hosting a friendly series of thematic team matches for about 18 months now. Our approach in that club has been to rotate the types of openings in our thematic series in the order "Open" game, "Semi-Open" game, "Closed" game, and repeat. It has worked pretty well in terms of having a nice variety of openings and appealing to all the preferences among the club members.

The opening distribution for future seasons is simply something to think about --- no "right" or "wrong" order exists in an absolute sense. Season 1 seems to be off to a good start!

Quoting @Caleb341 from the Notes on 4 August 2024:

"Would anyone here have interest in Thematic Vote Chess? 🤔 "

I noticed the discussion between a few admins about endgame positions and how balanced they have to be in a competition match etc. ...here a request from me. Please hold your competitions as simple as you can. Not everyone understand english in a way that is necessary (yes, it's me ) to understand complicate and difficult to understand ways to get your match open with the right settings. I for myself still struggling to understand all offered competitions in the OneWorldLeague (god bless Bernd speaks german) and the TCMAC. The more simple a competition is the more teams will participate.

I have a question here. Is the removal of players from the roster allowed even if they don't have a high time out percentage? I tried to read through the rules but I didn't see that cited.

Correct, there's no rules against that at the moment, mostly as it's extremely difficult to monitor and control this for league directors. I'd like to believe admins here want to play in a sportive manner. We started with very little rules and common sense and good practices as baseline. If not we are ready to introduce rules preventing exaggerated removal of players. But as I said it will be difficult to prove and then to enforce.

We are welcoming suggestions.

I hear you, generally it is up to the opposing admin to take screenshots and really pay attention in order to prove that players were removed. The onus is not on the league directors in that case. However, unless it's for a high time out percentage, it doesn't seem very sporting to me. But I got my answer and I'm cool with it, thanks.

I would like to suggest that a future season of the Thematic Openings competition be devoted to gambits. In other words, each round would feature a specific gambit opening.

More generally, there are several specialized opportunities that could be the focus of an entire season for the Thematic Openings competition. For example, there could be a season devoted to Indian defenses, a season devoted to half-open games, a season devoted to several variations of the Sicilian Defense, a season devoted to irregular openings, etc. To help ensure that the "specialized" seasons do not occur too often, the league might adopt a rule that only one out of every four seasons are devoted to "specialized" themes. Another idea is to make the "specialized" seasons shorter --- maybe only 3 rounds either as a Swiss system competition or with several quads (round robin). If the "specialized" seasons are shorter, then they can occur more frequently.

My suggestion could be applied to either the team match or the vote chess version of the Thematic Openings competition.

Thanks for the suggestion. Gambits were on the upcoming list, we weren't sure if they should have their own competition or included in the Openings one.

The next Openings season will probably align on a 4 weeks between rounds, more classical but less fast than the fist one. It means we will have maybe a little more than one per year, and it might be difficult to have it in parallel with a Gambit one as both can result in pretty big and competitive matches. Probably Gambit and/or openings could be parallelized with Endgames.

I think match highlights would be nice. Possibly when a team wins an event they (or any other team) can have a “game of the event”? It could work for Vote Chess and Daily Matches. Keep in mind I’m just letting my mind ramble here, but it could work.