Fixing FICGS

  

Fixing FICGS


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Ulises Pineda    (2026-07-07)
Fixing FICGS

It all seems to be about mentality, increasing one's rating so one can play better opponents and avoid low quality games, only to find out there aren't enough high rated players to fill those tournaments, depending on people that bought tickets to join, anyway.

Something that the LSS does is starting games ASAP, as soon as 2 players join a tournament, the game starts, and more games start when more players join. Unless you're the first to join, joining a tournament means starting a game.

I reckon it speeds things up, if 6 players join more than half the games can be over by the time the 7th one does (with time controls like 10 days/game with 1 day increment where clocks are frozen until the tourney fills up, so players don't have to play, but they can do so.)

Also, tournaments start by date, and if you have signed up in some category, the same category is opened up for the next tournament already, again, if 6 players are active the games of that tournament can start already, but 2 should be enough because that's enough people to have games.

Because right now we have players hungry for games that can't be played because the tournaments aren't filling up, we can just pretend they did and start some games and start the remaining games later when more players join.

If players are available, why do we need to wait for the tournament to fill up to start games?


Thibault de Vassal    (2026-07-08 00:36:10)
Fixing FICGS

As for me I like the way LSS starts games... and I like the way it starts at FICGS... but most of all, I like it is different.

Patience is why correspondence chess still exists (maybe it will disappear when seeing the world evolving).

Anyway the topic is interesting... maybe we should create a new category of tournaments (or modify a category), maybe with less players. Any idea is welcome.


George Jempty    (2026-07-15 20:55:33)
Fixing FICGS

An idea I've been thinking of lately is to focus on opening thematic tournaments, many more than we have here now, and establish a presence, and promote, on chesspub.com, and also reddit.com/r/tournamentchess There could be tournaments on certain popular opening every few months, and also touraments on varitions as voted on by members. I've been thinking about offering to pay Thib for access the source code for this site to set this up myself, but frankly I have bigger (non-chess) fish to fry


George Jempty    (2026-07-15 21:01:24)
Fixing FICGS

start some kind of group on lichess, even though its focus if far from correspondence chess, it's the best place to reach as many chess players as possible. Also an "ambassador" who plays welcome games with newbies, gives them advice on engines and software to use, the possibilities are endless.


George Jempty    (2026-07-15 21:03:50)
Fixing FICGS

Those are good ideas Mr. Pineda, I'm not at all familiar with LSS, just here and iccf. And of course I'm suggesting something pretty significantly different. And maybe that is to "scratch my own itch", since I'm very much an opening maven ....