In a previous text titled “Reverse Stafford as an Excuse” I have made a suggestion to our @chessbrotherspro on the new Hive Chess Tournaments Scoring and Rewarding System. Now, I would like to explain that proposal in a little more detail and put it up for public discussion.

Today I will present my suggestion on the example of the first season of Chess Brothers League tournaments, since they are still searching for the best format of their tournaments. I will also try to answer to the first reactions sent to the idea. One of the organizers, @eniolw had a positive feedback:

“Very interesting suggestions! Thanks for taking your time to think about this and share them. The only thing is, it would have been great to have them before launching the announcement post. I talked to my partners about this, although they are and will be out of town a bit busy these days. About the points scored, remember that it is not unlikely that someone will miss at least one tournament, so players from 11th position down will not get 8 points all of them at the end. Otherwise, the scoring system and prize distribution plan you propose are interesting. I wonder if @StayOutOfTheRZ and @SchamanGerbert have used that scoring system before.”

I am glad I didn’t write the text in vain, and I would like to state my case in a bit different way. I presume that any organizer of the tournament would want to gather as many people as possible. The key for more people would be stimulating them to participate and motivating them to come back every round. How will we do it?

Stimulating & Motivating

Chess is truly a beautiful game, but if you want only to enjoy it, then you don’t really need Hive. You can do it on lichess.org or anywhere else without Hive registration, rules, joining communities and other hassles. Stimulation in my system is done through cryptocurrency for all participants. Yes, the rewards are small in the beginning, but remember – every beginning is hard. It takes time to gain influence and more people for better rewards. But the people will come if there is a prospect for them to earn something alongside enjoying the game.

As for the motivation… With the current rewarding system, only the strongest players are motivated to continue playing all rounds hoping for a reward. The lower ranked players don’t even have a simple competitive motive of measuring their progress. See for example the rankings of an excellent Hivechess Tournament hosted by our @stayoutoftherz:

Out of 30 participants, the lower half have no motive to participate at all. They all have 0 points and have no orientation as to whether they had any progress in the tournament compared to the previous season, or compared to the opponents from this season. With my scoring system, there would be competitive motivation even for the weakest in chess tournament participants. Let’s now see at what the table of the first season of Chess Brothers Tournament would look like if the points were calculated according to my system:

! Due to the disastrous treatment of the tables on Hive, you will get the best view of this ranking through the PeakD interface.

It is very easy to form an Excel spreadsheet for this calculation. Of the 62 participants in this open tournament, 20 of them were registered on Hive, and potentially, according to my system, could count on a prize. The members of Hive won a total of 928 points, and the liquid part of the reward was 14.4 HBD. When we divide 14.4 by 928, we get the value of one point in the tournament – that value is 0.016 HBD. Now we multiply the points of each participant by this value, and we get a reward for each participant in accordance with the achieved result:

! Due to the disastrous treatment of the tables on Hive, you will get the best view of this ranking through the PeakD interface.

In this way, everyone would be stimulated and motivated to participate in every round of the tournament, and more importantly, people would have a reason to join our Hive platform and make their prizes bigger with their own votes. Along the way, they will learn what decentralized platforms and cryptocurrencies are, which is an invaluable gain.

Let’s look at the and the comment of our @SchamanGerbert:

“• The goal of the points is to get the next Chess King: And there is only one! So all other players are welcome to play but they will not be Chess King. And there is quite a fight about this position…
• The payouts from my tournaments are equally distributed to all players, so it is the most fair system in the world, especially for the weaker players. This is the best way to get them to the boards.
• Everyone can make a new format, nothing is fixed in the blockchain.”

A short comment on the first point: In my system you also get a Chess King, just no one is deprived of hope that he can stage a miracle! And even those who are left without hope for the Big Crown, will have a competitive motive to continue participating until the end of the tournament.

To the second point: It is a really great system, completely in the spirit of the Hive community, and I hope that you will keep that system as unique in the future.

On the third point: Indeed, if my suggestions do not come to fruition, maybe @the-real-betman, a true chess addict will organize his own chess tournament :)