i've been looking around and can't find a straight answer. how do you create a tournament on chess.com? also, when will chess.com open their first tourny?
The current way to start a tournament is to start a thread on the topic, get interested players to post in that thread and then organise the whole thing yourself. So far there is no automated system for doing this.
tournaments are in the works. then it will be REALLY easy to start and manage tournaments.
that said: does anyone have any tournament suggestions? preferred formats? etc?
the swiss system
different formats all have pros and cons. there are basically 3 formats:
swiss
pros: a LOT of people can play together in the same group
cons: you have to wait for ALL games to finish before you move on to the next pairing (can take a LOT of time in turn-based chess). also, once you lose 1 or more games you are "out of the money" and you get a lot of dropouts.
knockout
pros: the ladder format is very clear to understand
cons: again, you have to wait to see how pairings come down. also, once you are out you lose interest. very hard to do on a large scale (basically, for each round you lose 1/2 of the players. so for 512 people, you have 9 rounds - which at 30-60 days per round, is a LOT of time).
round-robin
pros: fastest format (more people eliminated per round and more games can be played simultaneously).
cons: easier to be eliminated.
with all of these there are issues around tie-breaks! suggestions!?
erik
I think it would be good to have a Chess.com championship open to everyone as a big Swiss System tournament. In general though, I would prefer most tournaments to be round-robins.
Erik - I don't understand what you mean when you say that people are eliminated in round-robins. In round robins everyone in the tournament plays everyone else, or am I misunderstanding you? 
sonofpearl:
in round-robin everyone does play everyone - in that group. but, if you have 100 people in a round-robin then playing ALL of them gets kinda crazy - you would have 200 games going on at once!! so, they are broken down into smaller groups (say 6-10) and then the winners of those groups progress into a new round.
so, for small groups (probably 16 or less) then round-robins will have only one round. but for larger groups they have rounds - kinda like a hybrid between round-robin and knockout...
id like both rated and not.
i've been looking around and can't find a straight answer. how do you create a tournament on chess.com? also, when will chess.com open their first tourny?