There are plenty of official tournaments on Lichess. But there is lack of Classical tournaments. There is Weekly and Monthly Classical. But you have to live in a convenient timezone to be able to participate in these. In my timezone, or anytime I login to lichess, I never find official classical tournaments.
The assumption made is that classical games are too long to allow for Daily or even Hourly schedules. This is so untrue.
Lichess considers 5+30 as classical. This is only bit slower than Rapid. This time control is convenient for regular and frequent classical tournaments.
If we create a custom tournament of 5+30, it can run for 100 minutes or 1 hour 40 minutes. If we round it, we could do 2 hour tournaments. Such a tournament, if scheduled, will allow the users to have official classical tournament available all the time. Once available, based on user interest, the tournament settings could be tweaked.
So how about Official Daily and Hourly Classical Tournaments?
Hourly wouldn't make much sense-- you'd get 2 games if you're lucky. Most classical is 30+0
I used Hourly for the lack of better word. In the details, I mentioned that Lichess allows for minimum 100 minutes for 5+30 tournament. So Lichess thinks it is feasible to have 1 hr 40 min tournament.
We can round it to 2 hours to allow even more games. I don't know whether to call it Bi-hourly. But this way we'll always have a classical tournament available.
There are classical Swiss tournaments at 6 , 8.30,12, 14.30 18.00 20.30 0.00 and 2.30 ( half of those with increment) UTC times everyday.Hope this maybe might interest you xxx
Thanks for sharing this info. Classical swiss tourneys are nice to have.
However, there are limitations in swiss system (e.g. having to wait for a round to complete though players are available, inability to join an on going tourney, etc). So having swiss tourney wouldn't address the need for arena classical tourneys.
Well if you like playing classical , you should probably have a patient attitude. Lol , Swiss tournaments, you have that option to play classical , happy chessing xxx over and out xxx
Take this recent Weekly Classical Arena tournament as example:
lichess.org/tournament/zivOebDPIt has really long duration 20+10. It had 1336 players and within 5 hours they played 2605 games! Such a feat is not practical with Swiss tourneys.
If we imagine faster time control, 5+30 is still classical, and it would enable similar arena tourneys few times a day. I'm only giving 5+30 as an example. Lichess could arrive at a more popular, short classical duration for the tourneys like 10+30 etc.
Arena needs A LOT of players to work for classical, or people will simply wait forever for their next opponent.
Also, it doesn't make sense to create a tournament where you usually only play one or two games.
5+30 seems a very unusual time control, and I probably would not like to play it. Basically starting out in time trouble right away, not the way classical works.
As a rule of thumb, you should expect a single game take about 70 minutes in a 5+30 game. So pairing even the second game would most likely not make any more sense for the "tournament".
It seems like a manual game challenge would seem much better suited in these cases.
@kosu said in #5:
> inability to join an on going tourney
Not true, or at least not for most swiss tournaments I played on lichess.
If 5+30 is weird, there is 15+15, 20+5, or 25+0 etc. Typically, there is no time trouble in either of these time controls in my experience (I'm a very slow player generally).
Did Lichess try daily classical arena tourney and found it didn't work?
