Interesting idea

Here's an idea. If you're anything like me, you spend a lot of time checking your larger tournaments to see when (if ever) the round will be over. With all these vacationers and foot draggers, it seems like a single round could draw on for months.

Now, I'm not knocking the vacation system. Though, it wouldn't be amiss to say that the system is being abused. But that's another topic for another time (post forum links).

For the more hardcore chess.com player, those who have chess.com as a home page, those who reload the screen (just in case the auto-refrech doesn't work), those who plan their schedule around when their opponents are online (you've all done it), wouldn't it be nice to have at least some idea of when the round will end?

Here's the idea. If one were to plot a graph of games remaining versus the date, it's not hard to visualize the result. The right half of a bell curve would able to give us an increasingly good idea of the end date. The climax would be set at the start date, as games gradually ended the height (y-coordinate) would drop off. The most dramatic drop would occur between the start and end date (indicating the average game length). And, though theoretically the graph never intercepts the x-axis, when the graph got to be below one game remaining, the end date the round could be predicted. (Note: A large tournament would be necessary to account for outliers. A minimum 100-200 players playing 400-800 games might cover it. Of course, it would work better with more players and games. The minimums would have to be experimented with.)

Ok, lots of jargon i know, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution if you're confused.

Perhaps a site director could write a simple program for the site as a quick way to predict a round's end date.

Comments?

Is this the chess.com equivalent of the kids asking "Are we there yet?"

As a shameless -- and unfortunately uncompensated -- plug for chess.com, there really is a bunch of content on this site. You can certainly fill your time waiting for the next move from the guy who's in the Bahamas sipping a Corona and trying to impress the ladies with his witty chess banter. 

bahahah too funny...he's a friend

Darn. I was hoping we'd have something to watch on CNN besides the presidential race and the war in Iraq. But you can't have everything.