Cool report!
Maybe I should enter into one of these untitled Saturday's sometime.
Untitled Saturdays, or - don't forget that rook!
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solskytz wrote:
Do it quickly - before you become titled!
WOW - 2201 blitz !!!!
You still have a plus score against me 
May 22, 2017
0
#6
In case anyone's wondering how to join in future, we're running it as club tournaments in this group: https://www.chess.com/club/untitled-tuesday
May 22, 2017
0
#7
<Logozar> It will pass, I'm sure :-)
I also lost to my father when I was five years old...
<Phoenix_Scorpion> Thanks :-) I'm glad that you liked it!
May 22, 2017
0
#8
I have now reposted the article, with some important corrections, changes and additions - including (here and there) in the games themselves. Share and enjoy!
Hello everybody!
I’m very excited to write to the full readership of chess.com for the first time – and that, on a very exciting event.
We always look up to titled players. We admire them. They give us guidance and direction – we feel that they are those who really know how the game should be played!
We watch them compete in battles of giants on Tuesdays, at least once a month.
And then we think – shouldn’t we get an event of our own? We, the uncelebrated players who are not yet quite good enough for a title, the unrecognized heroes of the game!!
So – a guy by the name of @MGleason decided to do something about this!
As of June 6th, we will have our own events. They will be called “Untitled Tuesdays” – and the everyday player, who is not any kind of “master” yet, who has no pink background when he writes a post, will be given a chance to shine – or at least to express himself to the best of his ability.
As a matter of fact, a test event just took place on Saturday. Remarkably nobody cheated in this tournament – which may well become a model for great sportsmanship and the spirit of the game.
The first two rounds of any Swiss tournament, generally don’t mean much. There are great disparities in the pairings, and generally the higher-rated players win.
One player, @SmyslovFan, is extremely well known in our forums for his great knowledge and erudition.
On round three, after winning his first two games (I believe that this tournament should either be extended to nine rounds – or played as an “accelerated Swiss” – where one assumes that the top half already defeated the bottom half, and gives them one temporary point before round one – then cancelling it after round two – to provide more interesting matches for the early rounds) he dropped a half-point against another strong contestant -
- but right after this he started to look like the most likely winner of the event, after defeating another strong player, <LonerDruid>, in a fierce King’s Indian, where he had no mercy upon the queenside of his adversary.
I have never heard of @LonerDruid - but it turns out that he’s rated around FIDE 2100 – the last stop before you begin to get that shower of titles every 100 points or so. We will probably hear more about him very soon, with regard to these tournaments…
The round 4 leaderboard - note how @SmyslovFan overtakes @LonerDruid. He is now about to face the co-leader, @Triggerlips.
Did <Triggerlips> ultimately finish third because he forgot to capitalize the first letter of the second word in his name?
I will take this opportunity and introduce a new idea: a new TYPE of time-control.
You have Fischer bonus, when time is added to your clock after each move (as was the case in this tournament)
You have Bronstein bonus - in which there is DELAY before your clock begins to run - meaning that if you play fast enough you don't really LOSE time, but you can't ACCUMULATE it like in the above method.
Now allow me to introduce the Solsky bonus. In this case, if BOTH players run short of time, BOTH players get extra time.
In a 3 2 Fischer game that takes 40 moves (average length), the players will get an extra eighty seconds on an average.
Let's divide eighty into four unequal parts - we get 30, 25, 15, 10.
So - the game is played like 3 0 with no bonus.
If BOTH players get under thirty seconds - they BOTH get thirty extra seconds.
If both players get under thirty seconds AGAIN - they both get 25 seconds.
Then if it happens again - they both get 15 seconds.
The fourth time they go under thirty seconds - they BOTH get ten seconds.
And if they go again, BOTH of them mind you, under 30 seconds - they start getting 2 seconds for move, just like in the Fischer bonus.
The idea?
You can only have a "time scramble" and risk losing if you are SIGNIFICANTLY behind on the clock. You won't suddenly lose on time when your opponent has 0.3 seconds. If you suddenly lose on time - your opponent has at least 30.1 seconds - which shows that you used much more time on your clock.
The game won't take much longer than a Fischer-bonus game, as the reader can verify for himself.
It will only go into "Fischer" mode if BOTH players are pretty equal in their use of time - making everything much more fair and understandable than the usual time controls.
Most games won't ever go into "Fischer" mode - as one side will either use significantly more time than the other - or the game will be decided otherwise.
The Solsky bonus will also apply to classical chess - for example in game with 1:30h for 40 moves + 30m for the endgame, with a 30s bonus from move one - the Solsky bonus will be:
1:30h for 40 moves + 30m FLAT, but throughout the whole game, if BOTH players fall under 7 minutes, they BOTH get 7 additional minutes the first time, 6 the second, 4 the third, 3 the fourth and then it goes into Fischer mode, 30s per additional move.
I've been going around with this method since 2005. To the best of my knowledge it was never applied.
Now back to the tournament :-)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Sometimes the stars are all aligned, and the Goddess of luck smiles at you!
What can be a better reward for a player who is already doing well, then to have your opponent just forget to MOVE against you, at all?
Such fate befell our hero, @SmyslovFan, as on round five his opponent, @Triggerlips, who was leading the tournament together with him with 3.5/4 (nobody retained a perfect score by now!) simply stood still, didn’t move – and allowed @SmyslovFan to become the sole leader.
@SmyslovFan looked like the sure winner of the contest at that stage. Two rounds to go, he pretty much played everyone who mattered… now just coast along to victory, everything will go well.
Before we continue – a word here about @Triggerlips, who took THIRD PRIZE and who was rated 2087 blitz after the tournament ended: This player started EVERY GAME with the moves a3 and b4 – or …a6 and …b5, as the case may be.
That is – every game, except game five – which we will not show here, but which the keen reader is warmly invited to consult.
After round five, @SmyslovFan was leading surely with 4.5/5. He only had @LonerDruid behind him with four, and then three players - @Triggerlips among them of course – with 3.5.
Now the hierarchy is clear - we know whom is whom, what is what. The rankings are still fluid, of course, as some games between the top-ranking players are yet to be played.
If we thought that he was a sure winner, this was made almost into a certainty by round six – in which he won another King’s Indian contest – but this time less convincingly to this reader’s taste…
- While @LonerDruid drew with @Triggerlips,
, thereby increasing @SmyslovFan’s lead to a full point, one round before the end
Note that this leaderboard, after round six, appears here BEFORE @SmyslovFan won the game that you saw just earlier. He increases his lead to a full point - and it temporarily seems that a new player is standing on the bronze pedestal - except that he's dropping a full point this round, and will "only" finish in the fifth position. You will see him again on the next table.
Tragedy struck in round seven, though!
@SmyslovFan played a very thematic French against a much lower-rated player. His opponent created some weaknesses for himself early on, then @SmyslovFan managed to get rid of his bad bishop and exchange into an endgame where he had the much better minor piece.
He won a pawn and established thematic domination on the central white squares with invading rooks.
His opponent was lower-rated, he had the positional trumps, the extra pawn – and could easily force a draw and win the tournament had he wanted to – but who would take a draw in such a situation?
@LonerDruid, on his part – did what he had to do: he won a very tense Caro-Cann (and with a very strange setup, one must mention!) against the tough @SerBros, who finished sixth, scoring a total of 0.5 against the three prizewinners (remember the first game in our article – some really fine manouevres!) but defeating everybody else.
In these 3 2 games (you get three minutes for the game, and then TWO and only two extra seconds for each additional moves - this is Fischer bonus as I explained earlier), a time scramble doesn’t end immediately and dramatically with a flag fall; it becomes a fully-fledged test for the players’ nerves – as it never ends and you never get any relief, any chance to breathe.
The first player who blinks loses, and as the mirror image to the @SmyslovFan game above – here it was @SerBros’s turn to just drop a rook without a “logical” explanation (and who needs one when you were down to sixteen seconds already 15 moves ago!).
And so with equal points, @LonerDruid managed to edge out @SmyslovFan on tie breaks by the narrowest of margins (OK, the third-narrowest) – 0.75 tie-break points (I guess it was Sonneborn-Berger, by the looks of it).
So this is what the final table looked like. Note how I sacrificed the beauty of the medals, which appear on the top of the original page (https://www.chess.com/tournament/live/untitled-tuesday-test-event-841811) - in order to get in three good players who were just short of making it to the podium -@Hnya, @TacticalChessPlayer and @SerBrus.
This article didn't do justice to these fine players, who won many fine games - as we mostly (with few exceptions) showed them losing to the leaders.
@PokerRam finished in the seventh position, also with 4.5 points - and then we had @KaosKid,@Goldenstar2660 (again, you can't win a high prize if you fail to capitalize the beginning of the second word in your username!) and @Alvin_Cruz (not that it's any guarantee if you do...) with four - and @EvisNP, who finished with fifty percent (3.5 out of 7).
I received recommendations from @dpnorman, who will prepare the report for the first MAIN tournament on 6/6/2017, on which games to analyze. I didn’t really follow them consciously – but now that I looked at it – I actually followed them to the letter, without paying attention – just through looking at the tournament round by round and selecting the games that made it what it was.
Good luck to the winners, woe to the losers – the cards are shuffled and we all meet again in a couple of weeks (on an Untitled Tuesday this time). See you there!