Armageddon Science: How chess.com can solve it.

As chess becomes more and more online and the knockout format gets even more popular, Armageddon games are becoming commonplace. Standings and significant cash prizes are being decided by Armageddon games all the time. The problem is that we don't really know anything about Armageddon games. Most agree black is preferred in 5 vs 4, but by how much? We don't even have solid data on this, at least I don't know of any which has been made public. Collecting data is the first step, then it should be possible to tweak the time controls until a 50/50 balance between black and white is achieved. 

Chess.com is well set up to do this. I have an idea on how it can even be made really fun. Chess.com could host a series of tournaments similar to titled Tuesday with one twist, Every single game played would be an Armageddon game. No draws. After just one tournament you would have a significant data pool. Take a look at it and see that black won 60% for example and then tweak the time control to 5 min vs 3 min 40 seconds for the next tournament. Rinse, wash, repeat till the proper balance is found.

This should be pretty fun and certainly an entertaining format not to mention being incredibly useful. The one thing to watch out for in doing this is to make sure to have a way of sorting the data at specific rating levels. It could very well be that the proper balance for 2300 players is different than the proper balance for the elite players.  In any case having some data to go off of would be way better than the hunches, guesswork, and opinions which this very important format is currently based on.

A Swiss would be fine. Set it up exactly like Titled Tuesday, except each game would be played under Armageddon conditions.