Mid-stream Horse Change

Now that we've had a few weeks under our belts, we're all getting a better feel for how we should organize our game night. I've talked to several of you and I think we have a consensus as to how to move forward. First of all, forget everything that's happened before.

Rather than deciding matchups by what order people arrive in, we are going to do a scheduled round robin that will allow each of us to play everyone else twice (once as white and once as black). The method used for pairings was completely random. I listed all players alphabetically by last name then randomly assigned each a number from 1 to 6 (using this web site's random number generator). From there, I used the same site's Round Robin pairing algorithm to set up the games. You can see the detail on these pairings by opening the Chess Rankings spreadsheet link to the right and clicking on the Pairings tab.

In order to keep things moving and prevent players from having to wait a long time for their next round, we will use timed games of 40 minutes. This should result in games of around an hour since it will be rare for both players to use up all their time. Hopefully, we will have time each week for everyone to play two games. Martin plans to buy a clock, so we will have 3 to use by next game night.

Finally we will restart everyone at 1100 and use the same ranking method as before to determine new scores based on win-loss-draw. There seemed to be a consensus that we would no longer count games played outside of the usual game night in the rankings. In fact, I have recalculated and reposted everyone's current ranking based on this change, although, surprisingly, the scores and rankings were nearly the same either way. Nevertheless, the round robin scheduling should result in a much more accurate ranking of players.

Here are the pairings. Please post a comment or email me if you have any questions about any of this. Click on the image to get a larger view.