How to Speed Up Tournaments - Help!

how about this:

let's say top 3 in a group get's to the next round. give hypothetical full points to everyone (both sides of a game, even) for all the remaining games and see if the top 3 spots change. if not, then it's decided. let the top 3 go to the next round and let the others continue their games at whatever pace they wish. calculate this automatically after every game in the round. this sounds pretty simple to me, am I missing anything?

edit: OK several people have already mentioned this method, so I guess I'm on sane grounds. the problem seems to be when to calculate this. Although I don't see why this would be a problem since the server calculates new ratings after every game, one idea that comes to my mind is beginning to calculate this after each game when the top "number of spots advancing" haven't changed for a certain number of games. that certain number needs to be calculated according to the total number of games the round has. 

I will also do in future, I think.

I just resigned a completely drawn game after making two draw offers which were rejected. The game had been going on since June. I'd had enough. I immediately resigned the second game against that opponent without even making a move (no disrespect to him intended).

While on my soapbox, I'd like to ask how we can get more equal pairings in tournaments. In my recent or current tournaments, I'm largely paired with players 100s of points higher than me. Shouldn't players get paired with players who are reasonably close (or as close as possible) to their own rating? E.g. +/- 100 points. That would make tourneys more challenging for all concerned.

group 5 is all clinched

http://www.chess.com/tournament/usa-u1500-championship

one game in one of my tourneys has taken almost half a year, all the other games are finished, AND they still have another game after it.  (Although my first mistake was to make it a 10 day/move tourney)

http://www.chess.com/tournament/blacknight13s-tournament-2009

http://www.chess.com/echess/game.html?id=22931970

There should be some limit on the usage of Vacation Mode atleast in tournaments. In one of the tournament which i am playing currently, i have only 2 games left in the fist round. Its a 1 Move per day game. Both games are with the same player & he is going to vacation mode because of auto protection mode.

TD should be able to define, how many time the vacation to be allowed per user if its a vacation allowed tournament.

We can understand when a player change to status to Vacation and take vacation for few days or weeks. But auto timout protection for each move is not good enough for the tournament

Another option is, whenever a game is going to vacation mode because of Autotimeout protection, reduce remaining vacation days for the year by 1 days (I  guess, currently it will reduce only the minutes/hours till he makes the move

 Well, I think the problem is, that if you put up groups with players of nearly equal ratings, you cannot avoid to get some "strong" groups and some "weak" groups ("strong"/"weak" means, adding the ratings of all group members together gives a high/low number). The strongest group will contain the (let's say) 5 strongest players. Normally, only one of them will advance to the 2nd round... - is it this what you are going to propose? Of course such "pairing strategy" would give "weak" players more chances to advance to higher rounds, but what about the principle that the final tournament positions should reveal in some respect the "strength" of its participants? There is yet another aspect: At the moment the pairing strategy gives some advantage to high rated players, because they can expect to be the "group leader" (concerning rating) in the 1st round. If you drop this, it could be advantageous to start with a low rating (which is much easier to achieve than a high one)...

http://www.chess.com/tournament/need-for-speed

All the Round 1 Games are completed except for one. The result for this game is 100% decided.

One player is having Queen + Pawn. Other player is just trying to extend the game with lonly King :). He waits for the last minute to make the move.

Finally i messaged him to finish the game quickly. Hopefully he will do that

7th chess.com 1600-1799 three games left none affect outcome.   Two are can you mate me with your queen.    Fifteen games of 4760 left to finish 40 days ago.  When you consider the number  of players being held up for these last three games this seems unreasonable on its face.

Vacation time per round should be limited to say three weeks or some function of the time limit.  When premium automatic vacation springs into action it should be effective for a limited time, perhaps twice time control, otherwise the time control is meaningless for those with lots of vacation time available.

Could someone please explain why there is a premium automatic vacation? I can see at least three reasons off the top of my head why there shouldn't be such a beast:

1. It doesn't correspond to anything in OTB chess or correspondence chess. If you want vacation in correspondence chess, you have to inform opponents and officials ahead of time, you can't just let your time lapse and claim you were on vacation.
2. It makes time controls unfair and uneven. For some people the time control is just different, because they don't have to post a move when other players have to. If it's a one day tournament, some people can use 1.5 days per move. That's not vacation in my dictionary!
3. Lastly but most importantly for this thread - it slows down tournaments! I was in the same one as gwhuebner (and Erik for that matter), and at one point there were 9 games left, of which 8 were by one player, who I observed to use this automatic vacation on pretty much every move.

The only reason I can see to have this automatic vacation is to decrease the number of time-outs. Well, I have a great solution to that: play in tournaments with a longer time control!

 Yes, of course, sorry. I have corrected this ...

Hey, 

the leader in my group won 7 games out of 10 when I had 1 point.

Its bad enough that I have to close a 6 point deficit but now pressure to move on!

As long as the algorithm has it right move them along.

The queries can be initiated as soon as a game in the tournament is completed. The query can be linked to completion of any game in the tournament

Another totally different idea is, make it more like live chess. In live chess, specific time is given for a move and specific time is given for the whole game. For example, 5 3 is live chess stands for 5 minutes for the whole game and 3 seconds for each move. We can make similar to this maybe 10 2, meaning 10 days for the whole game and 2 days per move. The idea behind this is allow people to move in thier pace and have the time as a whole instead of move-by-move.

I'm waiting for one game (not affecting the list) to be finished in this tournament

http://www.chess.com/tournament/team-asia-960-tournament

The previous game was finished 17days ago as of now.

Interesting one. But how is that going to help us. Maybe this is not the right forum for this kind of suggestion.

It is true for Swiss format. In swiss format players are not knocked out after each round. However, when other format are used, it is best to follow the rules set by the format. The rules are fine-tuned to be as-fair-as possible.

One way to have faster tournaments is for the Chess.com staff to implement an additional time control for players who would like to play at a quicker pace.  For example, a time control of Game in 14 days insures that all games in a given round will be completed within 28 days (assuming simultaneous games).  However, there would have to be a sufficient interest in this additional time control to justify the effort required for implementation.