"Good practice rules" for Team-based Vote Chess

I have not been on the Power of Chess Team.  But I know those rules work.  There are players who are serious about vote chess and they do not want hours spent on a game ruined by a selfish player who just votes.

Think of it this way. Ponziani Opening has a high win ratio but even so it is under 50% as there are losses and draws.  The Ponziani win ratio is 41% to win a game or 17% chance of win two in a row or 3% chance to win 4 in a row etc. To do better requires skill and discipline.

Any given game can be ruined by one person just voting and not following the rules. 

For many of us, vote chess is a learning experience.  Winning is great, but the real value comes in the discussion and analysis of candidate moves, positional considerations, planning and implementation.  Simply voting without consideration defeats both winning and learning.  Anything that is done to promote discussion and analysis is great.

Step 1: choose team members carefully, who are like-minded

Step 2: _________

Step 3: profit

May I make some comments about my 3 rules and my motivations in writing this post.

1. Borgqueen, Rule 1 does come from Team Australia, but I only discovered that AFTER I had voted too early. The problem is that the rules were not explicit, nor enforced. Team Asia does enforce it.

2. While we would all like our Team to win, I think the emphasis should also be on mutual interaction of team members, and mutual learning from each other. If I have a choice, I prefer to be in a Team which fosters discussion than one which plays "follow the leader". I prefer to learn than to win!

3. This places some responsibility on highly rated players to encourage team members to contribute and to offer constructive criticism; "Yes, I understand your point, but have you thought of .....". 

4. If highly rated players choose to dominate, then perhaps they should reconsider why they are playing "team-based vote chess" and whether their time would be better spent on 1-on-1 games.

5. While I appreciate some members shoot from the mouth (me, included, although I supply the supporting analysis) and others prefer to listen until everyone has had their say, if we are to have a real team-based voting process, then I feel it behoves everyone to say something within the first 12-24 hours. Otherwise, new ideas cannot be properly considered and analysed.

6. The reason for my insisting on continuations is that focussing on "the next move" is contrary to chessic strategy, and quite simply, reinforces bad chess habits. GMs focus on a sequence of moves within a plan or counter-attack; we should be learning to follow their example. Even a simple "if .. then .." type of analysis is a good beginning, which should be encouraged in all team members, regardless of high or low rating.

About myself, I have been in marketing and employee research for 30+ years, included 10 years in academia in Melbourne, Australia. I have a life-long dedication to education and to fostering learning. QED

Every good Vote Chess team on Chess.com has a leader. Or it will be the case of the dum  leading the dum. A good leader knows when to step back a let the group figure out some moves. I will not go into details of these tricks as they are trade secrets of certain groups. With a leader around it is easy as you can ask 'why not a certain move or ?" . Also the bonus is if you suggest not the best move you will be informed of it immediately.

About a year ago i was on team that tried that no leader stuff against a seasoned team that was used to playing together in Vote Chess. Tic, tic, tic and most of the time barely getting the correct vote at the last minute, which sooner or later you will get it wrong.

The leader has to be a seasoned Vote Chess player. Famaliar with communicating with various people with different back grounds. Has to be able quickly and clearly explain why the move they suggested is the best move. Which shortens the discussion as sometimes it becomes to chatty. Some times players are busy with their own games is just want the best move and they vote for it. The will then come back later and take a serious look at when they have time. This solves the problem of even a good player just rushing in vote because they need to get back to their games as they have to catch up with it their move in several games.

Really it is impossible to put in stone how a Vote Chess team should play. Each group has their own personality so what one rule works in one group may not work in another group.

@ geoffalford

Some players do not care to focus on learning in Vote Chess and just want to play the game. They like the idea of testing their current skills and play it out. Nothing wrong with that at all. Another reason for a leader.

The problem with not caring about learning and just throwing out a vote to see if it works is that it can ruin the game for other players. I have seen this happen several times.  If you do not want to learn and improve your game but just want to throw out moves and vote on those moves--you should not play in vote chess.

Each vote chess group can make it's own rules on how to participate in vote chess.  The teams who are the most disciplined and have the best set of rules will be the winning teams.  If you have a set of rules then all members of the vote chess team benefit.  The stronger members do not see their efforts thrown away and the weaker or avarage members learn a lot from the discussions of the moves and the moves chosen.

Here some of the best practises in most of my teams:

Rule 1: Be aware of your role as either a early, mid, late voter. As a early voter, please detect possible moves and make us avoid loosing on time-outs. As a mid voter please analysing and add advices and proposals. As a late voter join and finalize our decisions and make them happen.

Rule 2: Contribution by adding good advices and proposals towards mates that not yet submitted their votes.

Rule 3: Never force your mates to discuss or negotiate or making decisions in consensus. And never force them to stop voting.

Rule 4: Never force or suggest your mates voting on resign. Please silently leave the game if you don't believe we're able to win the game. Please let those that still believe we're able to win continue playing and win the game.

These rules - or rather best practises - are mainly applicable for larger teams that applied the rapid vote chess approach and playing a lot of games in parallell. The rapid vote chess approach works best when attempt to run a lot of games in parallell and rapidly improving on vote chess leaderboard.

So, smaller teams that are specialized in vote chess and perhaps not playing so many games in parallell may have to apply other rules/best practises.

My experience is that the rapid vote chess approach leads to an ability running more games in parallell. So even if the winning ratio may are less good than for a smaller specialized team, it makes the rapid vote chess team moving forward more rapidly on the vote chess leaderboard, but may not as good ELO.

Team strategies for vote chess - just to summarize
--------------------------------------------------------------

Is a larger team, and want to play many games in parellell and rapidly improving on vote chess leaderboard?
If so, apply a rapid vote chess approach.

Is a smaller team, and want to win tourneys and keep a good ELO?
If so, may consider another approach than the rapid vote chess approach.

It can be some challenging for a team at the same time playing a lot of games in parallell and rapidly improving on vote chess leaderboard, and win tourneys and keep a good ELO at the same time. I not say impossible, but challenging.

If pretend for this, probably have to organize the games in a special manner, where the rapid vote chess approach is applied to all those games that mainly are running in parallell, and then a modified approach for the tourney games.

But anyway, here some good advices in any cases:
- continuously increasing the number of players that participating in the games
- continuously increasing the share of mid and late voters
- continuously improving the average ratings in the games

In the longer terms this will improve the quality in the games and the outcome in terms of ability playing lot of games in parallell, the winning ratio, new points on vote chess leaderboard, and ELO.

Yeah..it's a tricky thing, especially in the larger teams. In smaller teams that may are easier, but in larger teams you've to think different.

For larger teams I rather say it's a question of continuously fine-tuning your best practises. Many mates - especially new ones - are not aware of the application, but it's good enough that a few good early, mid, late voters are aware of all this, and then contributing by acting according to these roles.

As a supervisor or experienced vote chess player, you can contribute by notify less experienced (or new mates) about how we're playing.

A difficult case is if a new member join to the games and begin trying to apply another approach than we've already have applied.
For example if a guy starts to force mates to discuss or starts to advice or suggest mates voting on resign.

Then the supervisor or experienced players have to make him/her aware of that we do not force mates to discuss and suggest resigning. In worst case the team admins may have to remove this player from the vote chess games, or even from the team.

This makes it possible for the team to optimize their current approach, slightly fin-tuning it, and improving.

I'm aware that some guys hardly understand this when joining to the larger teams vote chess games. But they normally have to participating may be in 10-20-30 games before they really understand the applied approach and are able really contributing. The larger teams vote chess games is not so much a question of discussing, negotiate and making decisions in consensus. It's rather a question of role playing, listening, contributing and following.

I do not think weighing members for how many votes they get would work at all. Too many hurt feelings. Are you gonna weigh one member with 15 votes?

Here is the way I think a vote chess team should work. This is mostly from when I was with Ponziani Power.

Strict Rules will be posted in forums and every new member advised to read those rules. If someone does not follow he gets a warning and then  if he delibertly continues to not follow the fules he would be kicked out of vote chess.

Here are some sample rules.  

1. Nobody can vote the first 24 hours unless it is a forced move or very obvious move. [nobody can ever vote for an undiscussed move]

2. From the start anyone can discuss any moves and other members will comment also. Very often we have diagrams of the move discussed and possible continuations. Often there are 2 or 3 main candidate moves to discuss.  

3. After 24 hours if there is a 100% consensus on one move then team members can vote.  If there is not 100% consensus [even if there is only one holdout for a different vote]  then discussion  continues until there is only 12 hours left. [ or until there is a 100% consensus]

4. With 12 hours left if there is no 100% consensus for one move then there can be a vote but by this time there should only be 2 candidate moves.

In Ponziani Power at first we had a team captain to make sure the rules were followed. However later the members became so disciplined that no team captain was needed.

We often had pages of discussion with diagrams--more than any other team I have ever heard of.

And it works!  Ponziani is a good opening with a 41% chance of winning an individual game with a 29% chance of losing and a 30% chance of a draw for one individual game.

So you can see for one game chances are--even with the very best opening you will not win as the draw and loss add up to a higher percentage than a win.

Ponziani Power had a 13 game winning streak when I had to leave.

This includes one that we were winning but there was no resignation as yet.  The chances of a 13 game winning streak based on math is less

than 1 in 100,000.  Hopefully I have made my point?

By the way in Ponziani Power we just did not look for "book moves" or moves "made by a grandmaster" --we looked for the very best move in each position...

These "unwritten" rules, which sometimes are written, for me rather take the fun out of vote chess. Each team may have its own rules, and keeping them all in mind is difficult. When I played vote chess, that game was not at the top of my mind. I don't necessarily know if it is in the first 24 hours, or the last. I typically write some comment in the group forum chat for that move, read what others have written, and vote.

I guess I would be a bad vote chess team member... I suppose it's all for the best anyways, since vote chess isn't really my cup of coffee.

All rules can't apply to all teams.

The "wait till 12 hours left" rule, for example, can only apply to regional teams approximately in the same time zone.

Else someone with net access for maybe 8 hours per day possibly can't participate?

The wait until only 12 hours is left seldom happens if you have a good group as 90% of the time the move will be decided with 24 hours left and 100% consensus.

The very seldom timess we had to vote with 12 hours left there were two choices and the better move won by a wide margin.

The person who has acess only 8 hours a day will have by then had the opportunity  to view and make comments and analyze and watch analysis for up to `16 hours. 

The thing is the system I described actually works--there is math chance of less than one in a hundred thousand to win `13 in a row and this was partially achieved by the methods I described.

It does help if the stronger players start analyzing from the start of a new position.  There is really no point to shut out the stronger players at first  and let the not so strong give a bunch of bad suggestions.  [this shutting out the best players at the start of the position was suggested in my group and tried and failed miserably]

But is the point of vote chess to win, to have fun, to play as a team, or something else? What is achieved from organic voting? What is achieved from top-down rules?

Very good point.I believe it's good to share experiences, but I neither believe there're any kind of common rules that are applicable for all teams everytime. Each team have to find out what suites best for them. But it's good sharing experiences and ideas and by that hopefully contribute to possible improvements.

Rapid Vote Chess mainly builds organic voting. The knowledge improving meanwhile more people join and add comments and voting. It  builds on getting a lot of players onboard that makes their votes, rather than force people by disciplinary interventions. Rapid Vote Chess is like a football game, where the goal keeper gives the ball to a mate, that kick it to someone else, and further to a forward that kicks it into goal. Not all players are goal keepers. Not all players are forwards. But they all contributes to make the whole team making the goals. Of course the team need a good goal keeper, as well as some good forwards. Every player have to improve their skills, and then all together. In football you don't make decisions by consensus, neither necissarily discussing so much. You rather "listening", got the feeling, and make it..together.

This is something completely different compared to those approaches that want to force people discussing or stop voting. But this approach may work best in the largest teams, while modified approaches may work better for smaller teams.

If you have learned nothing from vote chess it is only because you are on the wrong vote chess team or teams. In Ponziani Power people joined just to learn from the discussions of the opening and middlegame. [We seldom got to an endgame]

Also, a great vote chess team will have a ton of information in its forums.

Of course the elephant in the room is the cheating in vote chess...

It is not true that you cannot detect who broke the vote chess rules, in fact, it is very easy to detect the person.

In a discipline team with a set of rules.  You know for example there is a core group of experience players who follow the rules. So one clue it would have to be someone outside of the core group.  Possibly a newbie.

You can ask who made the vote out of turn? Usually you will get an answer.

If not you  can ask each player what move they voted for and when? In fact as a matter of routine most voters give their vote and when it was posted without even asking.

It is really easy to detect someone not following the rules since all the experienced players follow the rules.

This has happened in Ponziani Power  usually it was just a newbie who had not followed the rules and admitted it and was given a small warning and it did not happen again.