Why not separate tournaments by strength?

In almost all real-life tournaments, the event has a category that specifies how strong the players in it are. Unfortunately, it hasn't been implemented in online tournaments for some reason.

There are a number of benefits for categorizing tournaments by rating:

1 - Often, there are plenty of beginners that like to find someone their own strength; if they use the current system, they quickly get destroyed in the tournament and feel terrible after being placed near last place and losing many games.

2 - Stronger players are often bored having to beat much lower players since it feels too easy and there is no competition. We've all seen what happens to chessbrahs: he gets so bored that he berserks every game, giving time and material odds, and occasionally asks his fans to give him a "challenge" (weird openings, etc). The bigger the gap between players, the more "trollness" there will be.

3 - By creating classes in tournaments, a player can get a relative view of where he/she stands relative to other players of similar rating. Consider a 1900 rated player playing a random tournament and end up in 12'th place, for example, with top standings being all 2200+ players. This number 12 will not mean much since the variance in the field is too high. Now if the same player was playing in a 1800-2000 event and ended up 3rd place, they will feel better about themselves and not get completely obliterated by stronger players.

For these reasons and more, I'd suggest creating rating classes for tournaments. For example, there can be beginner tournaments (rated 1600 and below), intermediate (rated 1600 - 1900), advanced (rated 1900 - 2200), expert (rated 2200+), and of course, open tournaments (all ratings).

Thanks for taking this idea into consideration. I'm interested in hearing your thoughts.

Maybe there could be an extra price for the person who played extraordinarily well for their rating(!) in an open tournament. So even if you lose most of your games you could still achieve that if you won against 1 or 2 stronger players.

I don't understand your point #3. A player already knows where he stands relative to other players of similar rating... He is as strong as them, by the definition of rating! The rating is calculated over many more games, so is much more indicative of each player's strength. In a tournament of players of equal skill, the tournament rankings will be affected by random factors more than by variation in skill.

(Incidentally, ratings on lichess fluctuate much too wildly. Maybe they're using incorrect parameters for the Glicko system. So the ratings are not completely accurate, but still much more indicative than tournament results).

As for your main thesis - I think that currently, there aren't many players in lichess tournaments to begin with, if you classify by rating you'll get less still. Maybe when tournaments will be more popular.

#4 I like the idea of rating-capped tournaments alongside the open ones. The definition of rating is completely different to the joy of winning.

I agree that the glicko2 on here seems to give huge fluctuations.

There are PLENTY of players in the tournaments, especially the 'more important' ones like the daily, weekly or monthly bullet. In my opinion more tournaments of different sorts is the way to attract more players both to the site and into the competitions. Variety and choice is always good for consumers.

@Toutatis - Read again what I said. I didn't say rating-capped tournaments are a bad idea or that they aren't enjoyable. I was commenting on a specific point made by the OP (point 3). He said that this would allow a player to "get a relative view of where he/she stands relative to other players of similar rating".

I was arguing that this point is complete nonsense. You are correct of course that rating-capped tournaments have merit, for reasons described in the OP's other points. (e.g. the joy of winning, which has nothing to do with "getting a view").

I have to also take issue with your very last sentence - variety and choice is not always good, you should read up on choice paralysis (see e.g. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice).

You are probably right though that more variety will be good *in this case*.

#6: I didn't suggest that you said described rating-capped tournaments as a bad idea. I simply gave my own opinion of them: I think they are a good idea.

With regard to your other point, if you knew my background you probably wouldn't suggest I read up on choice paralysis. Tbh I'm not a big fan of Barry Schwartz. May I respectfully suggest some rather more interesting reading material for you... Sartre's 1946 lecture L'Existentialisme est un humanisme might be one for you to check out. There's also a good article about in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/

It depends on one's philosophy. In my opinion, variety and choice are always good.

@Toutatis: Thanks. Actually I haven't read Schwartz's book myself, and as I was writing my answer I was surprised that this is the best link I could find. But regardless of the specifics of what he's saying, I think the general principle is consistent with common sense, observation and my experiences, so I regard it as true.

If you've already thought about these issues I won't try to persuade you otherwise, and this is getting off topic of course.