Suitability of acceleration?

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Wadih Khoury
Posts: 604
Joined: Sun Jul 12, 2020 8:14 pm

Re: Suitability of acceleration?

Post by Wadih Khoury » Wed May 19, 2021 3:28 pm

Thank you all for the feedback and good points.
Given that the spread of ratings increased since my original post, I decided in the end to go with 2 different sections. While I do expect some mismatches, they should be significantly reduced.

Kevin Thurlow
Posts: 5821
Joined: Wed Apr 30, 2008 12:28 pm

Re: Suitability of acceleration?

Post by Kevin Thurlow » Wed May 19, 2021 5:02 pm

When I controlled the Combined Services tournament, we usually got about 40 entries, ranging from grades of 200+ at the top to about 120 in the middle, and maybe 6 - 8 players who had never played a serious game. Those who were graded sometimes only played this 7-round event, so the grade usually depended on their performance a year earlier. (One guy had never played a serious game, never handled a clock, and never recorded a game, but had played a lot online and was probably worth 140...)

Acceleration was appealing in some ways, but given that most of the grades were fairly or totally meaningless, it was decided to stick to a normal seeded Swiss and assume that seven rounds would sort people out. We explained to the newcomers, they would get easier opposition later. We very rarely had anyone finishing on zero, but also, the event lasted five days, so even if people weren't doing well, they could enjoy the social aspects.

I suspect in your event, you will get people performing much better than expected, as inevitably grades will be out of date (and of course anyone can have a good or bad tournament).

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