I won't say much about game selection and tournament structure; I'll play
in just about any event as long as the games are appealing and I have the
time. All the ideas posted here so far are good, but I hope the
multivariant tournaments with democratically selected games won't go
away; part of the fun of these has been the exposure to games that I might
not have played otherwise. My only real 'complaint' about the polling
process is that good old Chess doesn't seem to stand much of a chance of
getting through, and I'd like to play it alongside other games. (Hmmm...
maybe a 'Big Three' chess/xiangqi/shogi tournament?)
I have some thoughts about scheduling, which apply mainly to largish round
robins. In GCT1 the games were divided into three rounds; this worked, but
led to periods of relative inactivity if a round had one or two very long
games. For GCT2 it was decided that games would be assigned as players
became available. This was a good idea in principle, but in order to run
smoothly it seems to require an inordinately large (and prolonged)
time commitment from the director, who must continually check for finished
games and determine which players are available, how many new games can be
assigned, which of the remaining games should be assigned first, etc.
It seems to me that the game-assignment process could be automated. I'm
thinking of a script which could run periodically (once a day, maybe) and
assign games until it couldn't assign any more without exceeding a
specified maximum number of ongoing games for any player. The algorithm
to work out which games to assign wouldn't have to be very complex. The
part that I don't know anything about would be the interface with Game
Courier. Perhaps Fergus can tell us whether this would be feasible.
