Chess.com's Huge Failure With Pogchamps

First off, great initiative, great publicity.

My complaint is it's hard to follow the drama when they hide the results, hide the ratings, and hide the usernames. $50,000 prize fund! Wow, I'd like to know who is leading, who upset whom, who is the odds on favorite, but no, just endless disjointed articles. No main page to see the current standings, each player's tournament history, or the games.

Did you know that Voyboy lost to Erobb221?
Who cares right? Except the prize fund is 50k and Voyboy is seeded 1st in the whole tournament and Erobb221 was seeded last in that bracket. Could have destroyed his tournament, but voyboy moved on to the championship bracket.

Missed Voyboy vs Yassuo which was played a few days ago in the championship bracket? Well good luck finding it, because their usernames are @VoyboyGENIUS and @MellowsDad.

Did you know boxbox (@boxbox3) is a ~1200 player and hasn't lost a game yet? Of course you didn't. Probably no one but boxbox knows because chess.com doesn't think it's worth letting anyone know.

Well, I'm not going to make a fancy graphic for chess.com, something they should have done had they been even moderately competent, but here's the data anyway:

(3 points for a win, 1 point for a draw)

I haven't been following that but isn't a lot of that covered here?

https://www.chess.com/article/view/chesscom-pogchamps

Yes, that page helped me verify which games counted. With its help it only took me about an hour or so to compile the relevant information like seeding, ratings, usernames, results, who moved on to the championship bracket, etc.

The results of this poll illustrate what a poor job chess.com has done at communicating relevant info.

First of all we notice Hutch, who was probably seeded 2nd, who was streaming chess many years ago, and who has won all his games so far, coming in lower than "other."

Next we notice Forsen coming in 2nd in the poll. Forsen is rated 500 points lower than hutch and struggled to make it out of his bracket... and sure enough he's already been eliminated.

I understand people vote for their favorite player, or for names they recognize, but high rated players, and players who have preformed well recently consistently score highly in such polls... when that audience is informed that is.

Look, I don't care about these guys. I don't play fortnight and league and overwatch etc... which is why it's important for chess.com to do their job and make it entertaining for people new to chess (and like me, new to these players) by giving info.

Letting us know who is expected to do well and how they're preformed so far creates interest, creates viewership. It's important. It's also easy. Just give the information.

Where is the cross-table that they normally post with every competitive tournament? Seems like an easy way to visualize who has played who and who's in first

actually I just watch the games for comic relief. I gave up trying to figure out the info sir-foxy provided, as I couldn't find it either.  I noticed people in chat, and some times commentators seems to not know either.

Yeah, I suppose it would be quite nice if they had more I guess you would say, 'commitment' to PogChamps. I mean, obviously the streamers and commentators are really into it, but nobody else really is. It would also be cool if they summarized the player interviews in a forum because, if you don't watch it live, it's hard to go back and find again.

Yeah, I agree on that. There's only like a 10% chance that VoyBoy won't win, because he is 300 ish points above the 2nd highest rated.

Hutch and voyboy both closely rated, but definately much higher than the others.  Ludwig is commentating today with Hikaru, so this should be good, although I'll miss Alexandra, who was sent to the bench.

I was a little bothered that they had a whole section on Seeding in the Pogchamps article but didn't actually reveal what the seeding was, but instead just who was in what group.  Kind of weird if you ask me.  But anyways I personally have been going back through the twitch vods to try and learn from all of their coaching lessons and also to enjoy the games. I was able to find their usernames by just looking at the matches but sometimes their display names were different from their actual usernames, and I definitely felt like their usernames should have been more easily accessible.

On another note did you watch the voyboy vs erobb match?  voyboy resigned as a courtesy instead of checkmating him at the end, because it did not affect his own standing in the tournament to take one loss.

If they want to treat it like garbage, fine, but it seems inconsistent with investing $50,000 into the prize fund and getting their commentary team in on the action.

Showing the seeding and results is really easy. It's like they want to hide the fact that these guys don't really play chess... I don't care these guys are rated 800 or less (sometimes a lot less). I don't care because when money is involved it's fun to follow it from a sporting standpoint.

No, I didn't realize that. I came to the tournament late (yesterday) and was so mad that chess.com hid all the information that I decided to spend an hour figuring it out.

Finally, they post a graphic that shows the matches and results.

I'm not afraid to say good job when they get something right.

xQc or Ludwig!?

Yeah, see, that will actually be an interesting match. It's fun to follow even if they're rated a lot lower than me, because they're similarly rated and playing for money and glory

But without the bracket it would have been hard for me (and others) to find this info.

They threw $50,000 at this???
Do you know how much white guilt can be cured with that kinda money???

lol

But seriously, probably the easiest 50k they've ever spent. They're going to make a lot back on that investment.