Gamify Pool - Ladder

ICC, U.S. Chess Live, and Yahoo! have all demonstrated the viability of pools with rankings or champions:

"Command: one-minute

This is a different rating category and way to find an opponent. For those familiar with the 5-minute system, this is just the same only with a faster time control.

You just do the command "1-minute" and the system will automatically pair you with an opponent, usually someone near your rating and someone you haven't played in the last few games. You may have to wait a bit before it makes the pairing and starts the game, depending on how many other appropriate opponents are joining the pool of players.

The games are 1 0, and are always rated in the 1-minute category, not in the bullet category. This is the only way to start a game in the 1-minute rating category. The hope is that by not allowing people to hand-pick their opponents, not only will the ratings be more accurate, but also there won't be nonsense like having people avoid playing you when you're underrated.

Once the game starts, you should finish it. Disconnections are treated as losses. (Except in the rare case when both players are severely lagging, in which the game is aborted.) Of course, we realize that this means that players with unreliable network connections will tend to have lower ratings. But this rule eliminates a whole set of possible abuses and disputes.

You won't be able to play a 1-minute game if your average lag for your current login session is more than 800 milliseconds. You can see your average lag by typing "ping".

Computers and computer-assisted players are not allowed to play. Please do not get assistance from chess engines, databases, or from other players while playing.

The requirement for having an active 1-minute rating (once you have established a rating by playing 20 games) is 8 games in the last week.

Noplay and censor lists and formula are ignored by the 1-minute pairing system.

If two players waiting to be paired have an adjourned game (of any type), the pairing system will resume that game.

You can leave the pool of players waiting to be paired by typing "match" or "unseek".

You can list the best established active 1-minute ratings with the command "best 1-minute", or see where you rank with "rank 1-minute".

You can list the 1-minute games currently going on with "games *o", or watch the highest-rated such game with "observe *o" or "follow *o".
"
http://www.chessclub.com/user/help/one-minute

Yes. This. PLEASE. I honestly can't believe other sites aren't falling all over themselves trying to implement this correctly. It is BY FAR the best thing about ICC (not just the 1 minute pool, but ALL of the pools).

And another +1 on this idea.

I think the most brilliant part about the ICC style pools is that it's hard to understand why they're so great. Fundamentally it's just a randomly paired no-disconnect, no-abort, no-rematch game in its own pool which seems kind of... not fun? Yet then you play it and you're just like, "OH YES MORE MORE MORE."

+1

Not sure if/why it would be necessary to have a distinct pool rating though?!
But I'm all for ICC style pools, yes.

lichess' "quick games" are meant to be just that, no?

Yes, "Quick Games" are a pools implementation without separate ratings.

Lichess has tried pools with separate ratings before, but they lost popularity pretty quickly (the weirdest bit was the flood of people in the forum complaining about how they didn't like the pools because their ratings in the pools were too low...)

That was a while ago, though, so there might be enough players for those separate rating categories to be viable.

Quick Games are probably a decent test of how popular a fully separate pools system would be, so I guess we'll see how that pans out.

They lost popularity because of two reasons:

1) you could see who was in the pool waiting to play. If there was nobody there, there was no incentive to join, so nobody would. If there were only people with scary ratings there, nobody would join. Etc. There is absolutely no reason to show a list of players in the pool. It defeats the entire purpose and is detrimental to the popularity.

2) The "wave" pairing stuff. I understand that's what's going on under the hood on this new feature, too. It is also detrimental to popularity. The idea is to get a fair pairing as quickly as possible, but this "wave" pairing idea, makes you wait a set amount of time no matter if there is another ideal player sitting there waiting to play or not. Makes no sense.

The way it should work is you click a button, and it immediately looks for another player within a narrow range. If there isn't one to pair you with immediately, after a set amount of time, the range widens a little bit. If you wait another set amount of time and there is no one, the range widens even more, etc. This way, if there is someone ideal ready to play, you are paired immediately instead of having to wait for a "wave" to get there.

@DunnoItAll : Definitely agreed on the bit about the visibility into the pool.

That was probably the single biggest factor in their downfall, although I think the popularity of tournaments here (as opposed to on ICC, where tournaments are quite unpopular, relative to sought games and pool games) was a close second.

I was indifferent to the wave pairings piece, but I know a lot of people weren't fond of it.

The expanding window bit is how the Quick Games are implemented now, if I correctly remember how Thibault described them in another thread, so there's that (and you don't have any visibility into who's seeking, which fixes the big problem).

Hopefully Quick Games become pretty popular, and separate ratings follow shortly afterwards. That would effectively be a robust pools implementation already.

I assume/hope the lichess app will support those pools pretty soon as well. Right now you can use them in the Web version only.

I'm still not sure I get the appeal of separate ratings though. Does anybody care to explain?

The appeal is that it eliminates one of the major flaws of online chess ratings: the ability to choose your opponents. Only rating pools where no player ever chooses their opponents are sound statistically. Removing all the factors that skew ratings makes the pool the best possible measure of relative strength. You can't choose to play only weaker players, you can't abort if you don't like the player you are paired with, you can't choose to play more whites than blacks, you can't play a completely different time control which requires a completely different strategy/play-style and still be rated in the same pool, etc.

It's just a pure competitive chess experience. No berserking nonsense, no rating manipulation, no nothing. Just chess. Since I first experienced it on ICC, everything else has felt silly. I wish more than anything else in online chess that lichess would do it and do it right.

@DunnoItAll +1...at least :)