I am contemplating playing a tournament in several locations simultaneously. Each location looks like a normal tournament venue, with go sets and clocks everywhere and a tournament director herding all the cats, except that at one end of the room are N computers which are online to KGS. Where two players in the same venue are drawn for a game, they play on a board. Where two players in different venues are drawn for a game, they play it out in a designated private room on KGS. Whoever is tracking the draw and computing the placings does not mention to their computer that the players are scattered in several different groups.

This is a hack around the problem that we cannot get most of the ranked Australian go players to any given national championships. Travel is just too painful, and a lot of our older, scarier players Do Not Play On That New-Fangled Internet Thing so we can't just run a completely online tournament. But we could probably rig up simultaneous venues in the major cities.

What would you use for a drawing algorithm? Swiss? McMahon? How would you adapt these if you wanted to place a hard upper bound on the number of nonlocal games in each round?

I'd definitely use McMahon. GoDraw is a bit of free software available in the UK that does much of this, only it tries _not_ to draw people from the same location (in this case Club) if it can be avoided. I'm certain you could ask Geoff (geoff.kaniuk (at) yahoo dot co dot uk) how easy it is to compile a program with that logic reversed.

http://www.britgo.org/downloads/godraw/

Sounds like a really interesting idea, let us know how it goes if you try it!

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Nice idea and I hope it works.

Problems and solutions hat i saw...

Make sure the internet is working okay and have some backup access


Clocks / timing ed.
Which clock (ONLY ONE per player) determines if the flag has fallen. I don't think you can rely on the KGS clock for this.
what I suggest is that you use 2 clocks where the "near" clock (the clock of the "live" player ) has the exact time and the clock of the "away" player doesn't matter (give it 15 minutes more time then it still gives a broad idea about how much time the opponent has)
Only the flagfall of the "near" clock of the player is valid.


Tournament setup

I would use a McMahon style tournament with a topgroup (and maybe have a 2 point gap between the topgroup and the rest of the field, see my other thread in this topic). (if you disagree with this do comment in the OTHER tread)

Backup and so
I don't know how relaiable the internet is in the locations were the tournament is held but make sure it works. and that you can always fall back to a completely local tournament.
(It is sad enough if the internet fails, but don't let the local tournament fail as consequence of it)
so have a pairing program at all sites.

KGS and so
I am not sure if you can play more games (for different players) on one computer. (then you don't have to worry about not enough computers available)
I have send a pm to the maintainer of kgs about this thread hope he will join in.
if this is possible then maybe one person can act as "replacement" opponent for the away players.

Opperator mistakes what is by accident the stone lands at the wrong point at kgs or on the board, what determines the actual position?
(maybe keep more than one game record, again don't rely on kgs for this, you need a LOCAL copy)


Have a dry run with it if possible (just some players who play more games via this system at home to more opponents and so not bothering about the outcome)

Timezones, do plan carefully that players in Perth and sydney are at there board at the same world time. (but i guess you allready have experience with this)

Keep us informed and hope all goes well.

How do they do it in the US and Rusland (also very big country's)

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Uh... it's an interesting idea, I'll give you that.

Playing via KGS would be opt-in, right? I'd be pretty PO'd if I went all the way to a tournament only to end up playing on a computer.

As for suggestion: Follow the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid). Willemien's idea about clocks seems really weird. I'm not sure if I understand it correctly, so I'm sure that people just hearing it on the spot won't understand it either (specifically, if I understand it right, he's basically saying only one player needs to know exactly how much time is left... no, they both do, for a fair game). Just use the KGS clock, what's wrong with that?

We've done it a number of different ways.

Most big tournaments are "must travel to be there in person" events.

A few tournaments (especially qualifiers for bigger events) are completely online. So the player either plays online, or doesn't play. In the past, some of our older more computer illiterate players would arrange their own proxy who will come to their house and "play" online for them, while they themselves may use a real board. Some of our more recent online events are now starting to require webcams between the players -- adding yet another potential roadblock for our computer illiterates.

I don't believe we've ever tried gathering "local" players into the same room and linking the regional events together to form one main event.

Seems like that would require a few extra proxies (to either assist with the computer, or make the actual plays on the computer) and a bit of equipment to handle all that. But I think it would be a lot easier to validate as a TD (with TD assistants in each regional location).

...well. No. If you refuse to let certain competitors play you because they're in other cities, I don't believe that we should count you as participating in the tournament. But I would want each player to have at least a guaranteed fraction of their games local, because I have to agree those're better than this pixels-on-screen rubbish.

Of course that means a mutant McMahon, or similar, which is why I'm posting this in the Go Rules board.


Which is the other attractive thing. Having trusted people in each room makes it easy to know that competitors playing online are fair dinkum. That's most of the reason online games are not eligible for Australian representative points.

Not really limited to KGS; I just name that server because it's in a lot of use here, and if you spend a little time during registration making sure each player had a KGS account the thing will work. Names of other servers that would also fit this model of tournament would be most welcome...