You don't 'have' to wait for your opponent to move in online chess? Wow! Good to know, that'll save me some serious time. Thanks!!!
Anyway, for Live Chess as I understand it, only premium players can have multiple games going at once (that might narrowly limit the number of potential participants if it's easiest to program it for only those players able to have multiple games going).
sftac
Just had an idea...not sure if something similar has been suggested before, but here goes:
One of the advantages of Online Chess (vs. Live Chess) is that you don't have to "wait" for your opponent to make a move. Especially those players who have 30 or 40 (or more) Online Chess games going on at once, they simply log in, do their moves for their games in succession, and log out. No waiting.
I was just thinking that chess.com could replicate this experience in Live Chess, as follows. There could be "simultaneous quad" tournaments. Four players sign up, and everyone plays everyone else in the quad (as you would expect), except that all the games start at the same time. So each player has 3 games at once, say G/30 for each game. The chess.com interface always presents to the player the game with the least amount of time left. As soon as the player makes a move, the interface shows the next available game. If it's not the player's turn on any of the 3 games, then the player can browse between the 3 games while waiting. Alternatively, maybe the chess.com interface could show all 3 games at once, so there isn't so much context-switching.
Or maybe it should be 5-player tournaments so that you can show all four games at once in a grid. Of course there could be variants on the number of players and time controls.
I think this would combine some of the elements of Live Chess and Online Chess, and could be fun to try. What do you all think?