Main focus on bullet/blitz?

Why are there so few 10 min tournaments compared to 1-3 min tournaments?

Good morning,

I do not know the reasons, but I suppose that it is due to most people playing 1 min games or so games, and you can make 3-4 1 min tournaments at the time you get 1 10 min tournament done. This is worse for higher rated people since most of the slow tournaments are just for 1800 less or even 1600 less, thus if you are 2000+ tournament rated you only get one or 2 oportunities a day.

Another reason is that the warzone tournaments are really nice and funny and at this tournaments playing longer games like 10 min games would not fit the warzone criteria of playing games without having to wait for rounds.

I suppose those are some of the reasons.

Regards Xabier.

[bryan]

Agree with Xabier's points. A few more:

• There are simply more bullet players (not based on game count - since of course there are many multiple times bullet games played during a day just because they are shorter - but based on the game type most players prefer to play). Thus there will be more tournaments for them.
• Related to the above, users tend to like shorter tournaments. A 10 minute tournament would lock players into up to two hours of play in a 6 round tournament (6 X 10 mins X 2 opponents). Most users save such time expenditure and effort for offline chess and would prefer to stick with the quick tournaments online.
• It is relatively harder to cheat during bullet games. The longer a game is, the more advanced and even undetectable cheating becomes. During a bullet game, an engine cheat will find it practically quite difficult to keep up with engine analysis and not lose on time, let alone try to mix up how they cheat (e.g. centaur play) to avoid detection. Maybe to counter this, and still satisfy the demands of users who want long games, we could have a low entry fee and a small prize fund long time-control tournament... then legitimate players may play longer tournaments just for chess' sakes, and engine users will be less inclined to "waste" an hour or two for minimal rewards.

I guess the bottom line is that there is not much upside that we see to such tournaments. But I suppose we could try a few just to gauge interest...