Since most of the European Championship system proposals and the AGM decision of last year want to move the top Europeans from the Open-EC to a (mostly or totally) separate EC, some complain about too few games between top Europeans and top non-Europeans. This can be solved easily though:

Create an additional tournament for the late afternoon / early evening - the Top Players Tournament.

There are many possibilities of how to design it. Here is just an
example:

- One game per EC / Open-EC tournament day.
- There are 10 rounds.
- Participation is optional. If an eligible player does not want to play in a round, then the next eligible player is asked.
- The thinking time is ca. 2 hours plus 3 * 10s byoyomi. The players can negotiate different times, if they like.
- The starting time can be flexible, depending on how long an EC
player needs for his EC game. E.g., games might start between 16:00 or 19:00.
- For every round, choose the currently top X Europeans of the EC and the currently top X non-Europeans of the Open-EC. (X might be about 8 ~ 10.)
- Try to avoid repeated pairs as far as possible. Else swap colours.
- Either pairings ignore or take into account previous numbers of wins in this tournament. (Since mostly the same players will play every round, there is very little scope for additional pairing criteria anway.)
- After the tournament, there will be winners in 3 categories: a)
Total number of all Europeans' wins versus total number of all
non-Europeans' wins. b) Best Europeans in that tournament. c) Best
non-Europeans in that tournament.

I think time limits should be set. That way the event could be EGF- rated and itwould be a bit more different from from other game splayed in the afternoon.

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I believe that it is important to have a single main MacMahon tournament, in which all players play on equal footing without external interference on the pairings.

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A good system naturally covers all corner cases without further effort.

Harleqin, for the best realization of your belief, which improvements, if any, do you suggest over the current system?

may i propose my proposel W1

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Promotor and Librarian of Sensei's Library

First step: allow raising the top bar to 5 dan or 6 dan (depending on the player numbers).

Second step: allow a more flexibly defined supergroup, again depending on the player numbers.

I envision an end result along these lines:



As you see, there is no special provision for european quotas; this is a truly open tournament. For prizes, I think that giving the top 8-10 players a prize is OK, and the top 5 or 6 europeans get an extra prize. Players with equal MacMahon scores share. The prize pools should have a ratio of about 3:2 to 3:1 for open:european (keep in mind that the european prize is on top of open prizes for the europeans, and that there are fewer players who get prizes from the european pool).

The winner of the tournament gets the title "Open European Champion".

For the "European Champion" title, there are several options. One is to keep the current system and simply give the title to the best placed european player. Another is to at least let all the best placed european players who are tied on MacMahon score have another match/tournament. Finally, you could devise a challenge system: The best european player who is not the former European Champion gets to challenge the former European Champion for his title. This challenge can either be resolved in a single match near the end of the congress or on a separate date. If two or more players are tied on MacMahon score for this challenge, the challenger can be either decided on tiebreakers (SOS or direct comparison) or in a challenger decision match or tournament. A challenger decision match can be held near the end of the congress or on a separate date. A challenger decision tournament would need a separate date and consist of an up to four round round robin or swiss tournament on a single weekend. The title challenge itself can be a single game or a best-of-3 match.

I do not know which of these options would gain most political support, but I think that it is important not to interfere with the main tournament.

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A good system naturally covers all corner cases without further effort.

Although I disagree with you, your ideas as such are - as always - helpful.

Do you also have an opinion on these aspects?
- pairing strategies
- half-rank MM groups for 4d (and may weak 5d) players
- how to implement "The decision which players are in the super group should be based purely on rank to the best of knowledge"
- why you suggest 16 and 32 as bounds for the supergroup (esp. the lower bound needs strong reasons, IMO; since it is so small, the final results might depend strongly on top players ebing paired down more often than others

I have no particular opinion on the pairing strategies. I believe that there are already quite good standards, e.g., as outlined in Christoph Gerlach's diploma thesis.

I do not know what "half-rank" MacMahon groups are about.



Since there are currently no consistent global ranking nor rating systems available, I think that a hard and fast "implementation" cannot be given. It seems that the top european players can be sorted by their EGF rating, but non-europeans' ranks will have to be an informed guess.



These numbers are more or less just a personal guess from me and not the last word. I have the impression that the highest group should have no more than 32 players, and I think that the group below that should not be much smaller than the highest. So, if there are 33 players above the MacMahon bar, it should be possible to put half of them into the super group. I agree that at least 24 players would be much better, and that in such a case, the MacMahon bar is probably set too high, but what if there are 80 players in the next lower rank? This scenario is not very realistic, of course. It might be prudent to give a "preferred" lower limit of 24, though.

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A good system naturally covers all corner cases without further effort.

This is not good idea. 4-dan top group bar is good as it is. Instead we really should introduce middle group between rest of the top group players and super group. This would fix the top bar issue far more flexible, because ultimately we can decide whom we want to select to the group below super group. And from the pairing perspective we can select it to be nice sized like 16, 24 or 32. This way we can also promote young and fast improving players more flexible than to include them directly to the super group.

As I previously stated that in my perfect world we have EGC's top group configuration where we have top 24 players as super group, 24 or 32 players as middle group and rest of the 4-dan+ players.

This is almost the same, except that you would reserve the right to put a number of 4 dans into the top group or a number of 5-6 dans into the 4 dan group. This would put group size considerations before rank considerations. It might be feasible, but I do not know which variant has better political prospects.

I also do not believe in overpromoting young players. If these players are really "presumably unexpectedly strong", they should either have been promoted beforehand or have enough time to fight their way up over the course of 10 rounds.

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A good system naturally covers all corner cases without further effort.

E.g., you take all 4d and some sorting criterion for their relative strengths. Then you divide them into a lower half of Weak 4d and an upper half of Strong 4d. Now you put Weak 4d one MMS above 3d and Strong 4d one MMS above Weak 4d.

Indeed. When political wildcards were used for them, their performance did not justify the decision. I have seen only one good wildcard in 15 years: Svetlana as insei in 1998's supergroup. Other wildcard inseis failed.

Yes, almost the same, but more flexible and flexibility is the key issue. It is a reality that some 5-dans are more like 2-dan or 3-dan and some 4-dans are more likely extremely strong 5-dans. We need to have more flexible system than setting simple and fixed top group bar to e.g. 5-dan.

Perhaps promoting young players is not that necessary. But we need to have flexible system in the case of new svetlanas.

Dont look at given rank but at EGF rating. In case of no EGF rating - look at rank.

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