Mailbag: OTB Tournaments

My last few posts about OTB tournaments generated a lot of discussion. This week I’ll respond to some of the most interesting comments.

“I'm mid round at a 4 hour, 5 round rapid tournament right now. This is the way. Chess is just a board game, I'd rather play a bunch of games and get on with my life than sit there for an hour waiting for my opponent to move a pawn. This is fun, and I'm looking forward to the next game.”

-Harv

My feelings exactly! It may sound sacrilegious to call chess “just a board game”, but World Champions like Carlsen and Kramnik have expressed similar sentiments. Sometimes we need a reminder not to take it too seriously.

“I play online a lot and have wanted to get back into playing OTB, strive for a lifetime rating goal, etc., but even with the encouragement/shaming of episodic coaching, I don't do it. Why? Discomfort and opportunity cost.”

-Scott

Scott is a great example of the kind of player being kept away by our current OTB tournaments. These players are invisible to tournament organizers, because they won’t show up to tournaments as they exist at present. It’s impossible to say how big this demographic is, but it could be huge, perhaps much bigger than current active tournament players.

Chess.com surpassed 100 million members in 2022 and chess has only gotten more popular since then. Of course, some of these are inactive or duplicate accounts, but a tiny fraction would still be much more than currently active OTB players.

“There are thousands of us looking for the old-fashioned (and probably mythical) wood-panelled club room where we can go to play a serious game, hang out with others who love chess or listen to a lecture from a master.”

-David Smith

There’s a vibe that comes to mind when many people think of chess that wood-panelled perfectly captures. The vast majority of chess tournaments completely miss out on this, which is a shame, because it’s a big part of chess’s enduring appeal.

When the writer Louisa Thomas made a foray into chess tournaments, she observed, “It was something else to walk into a room, expecting something as quiet and serious as a chess tournament, and to find yourself at recess.”

Gorgeous period set pieces are certainly part of what made The Queen’s Gambit so popular. Chess tournaments could lean much more into ambience. I imagine many tournament organizers will say, “Sure, but who has the money for that?” But if you create a uniquely great experience, it opens the door to charge 2x or even 10x as much.

“I have heard before, that in the US, club members are required to bring their own chess sets to the club evenings. That was already strange enough for me, who have never played outside of Europe, but hearing that one might be expected to bring their own chess sets to an official tournament is a whole new level of it :-).”

-Michał Kaczmarek

I got similar comments from other readers in Europe, Australia, and South America. I knew that cramming multiple classical games into a single day was a uniquely American practice, but readers from outside the US were also horrified by other aspects of our tournament experience. It seems that American tournaments are exceptionally barbaric compared to the rest of the world!

“I also like how in poker, when you're really exhausted it's often because you're doing great! Love the idea of a format where there's blitz/bug/parties for the last round for those eliminated, and a high stakes final for the top contenders. It also allows for a greater media focus. And it could allow TDs to focus on game integrity for a smaller number of key games.”

-Jennifer Shahade

Just to spell out the point for those who aren’t familiar with poker tournaments: everyone starts with the same number of chips, you’re eliminated when you lose all your chips, and the tournament goes until one player has all the chips. So if you’re still playing deep into the tournament, it means you’re doing well and close to winning a lot of money.

Elimination tournaments are very exciting. We’re in the middle of March Madness, the end-of-season championship for college basketball, which is structured as a 64-team single elimination tournament. This event is hugely popular, largely because of the elimination structure.

In contrast, most chess tournaments are Swiss System, where every player plays every round. I wouldn’t suggest a straight elimination format for most chess tournaments – it would truly suck to travel to a tournament, lose one game, and be out – but it’s possible to combine the two formats. A standard structure in Magic: the Gathering is to have a Swiss portion followed by a single elimination top eight for the championship.

“I know you already know this, but the US tournaments seem to be designed with the assumption of participants having a full-time job Mon-Fri so they usually include a late night round on Fri and wrap up Sunday with this in mind. I think a fictional tournament would include these parameters. Not sure it’s possible to still be fun then :)”

-Richard McCormick

Several readers took issue with the specifics of the fictional tournament I proposed. The idea was that the three-day tournament would take place over a holiday weekend, but of course, the point was not that you should copy the exact details, but that you should be thoughtful about creating a good experience. The number of days, schedule, and time control could all be adjusted, but the experience should be engaging, not excruciating.

“I would also add from my perspective as a chess teacher that overly deep deliberation is often an avoidance behavior rooted in fear of mistakes. If you can't solve a puzzle in 5-10m, it's too hard for you and the best thing to do is to give up, look at the answer, take it to heart and move on to the next puzzle. Likewise, if your playing strength at a reasonable rapid time control is significantly lower than your strength at an excessively long time control, you're probably over-relying on conscious deliberation to make up for weak intuition, and playing faster time controls would force you to confront that weakness rather than continue to enable it.”

-Alex King

This largely matches my experience as a chess coach. Fans of long time controls often talk about creativity, but more realistically, competitive chess is about not messing up. When you give most players an abundance of time, they don’t use it to create artistic masterpieces (GMs do occasionally), but to get really stressed out.

I also liked Alex’s suggestion of a 30+30 time control, which would ensure players have time to keep notation throughout the game, while removing excessively long thinks in the opening. In general, time trouble addicts spend far too much time early in the game, when it’s least valuable, so this time control would go a long way towards saving them from themselves.

That’s all for this week. Next week, I’ll dive into an example from outside chess that could point the way towards a different kind of chess tournament.