Dear chess fans!
Finally S20 has arrived! Just 48h to go!
But first let´s talk a little about the past season.
The prizes from Season 19 were payed out in the meantime (as HP, not Hive!). Here a snaphot of the final prize fund:
In total 960 Hive (rounded up by me), currently worth app. 390$ (last season it was 647 Hive, worth app. 110$ back then) have accumulated exclusively from post rewards and were distributed among the 21 qualified participants!
Thanks a lot to all the upvoters and supporters!
🏆 Payout table of Season 19 🏆
Tournament 1 (<1500)
Tournament 2 (1500-1899)
Tournament 3 (1900+)
The more competition within a tournament, the higher the prizes.
Here I plotted again the participation of players over the previous 19 seasons, in blue the total number of players per season and in orange the maximum no. of players in a single round of that season. The dates reflect the month the season had started with.
The drop in S14 is due to the registration fee of 1 Hive I had requested (with the record of 88 players in S13 the amount of work to administrate and calculate the tables was increasing a lot). S11 is missing as it was a round robin tournament.
Back then in summer 2022 when S13 and 14 were played, the Hive price was 60-80c, higher than what is it now but not that much higher.
Could be that now in 2025 with Hive at >40c we could see more players again. What do you think?
The Hivechess Hall of Fame
is located here as a post collection (and includes ALL chess tournaments on Hive):
@badge-646464/the-hivechess-hall-of-fame
Select "View as post" in order to see it in a better way!
About Season 20
After the break and the fun tournaments 1 and 2 Season 20 will start this Friday, the 31th Jan. 2025, 20h GMT at the usual time! It will go again over 12 rounds and grouped in 3 skill groups based on Blitz rating.
Of note, if I don´t know the Hive user name belonging to your lichess name (let me know in the comments here), you can play but your result won´t be counted!
The percentage of post rewards feeding the prize pool is 60% and as mentioned the
Since the number of players in the 3 tournament tiers in S19 were roughly balanced, I will keep the same tresholds as last time. Again they are based on the average rating (Blitz) over the whole season (players can change tiers if their rating changes): <1500, 1500 - 1899 and >1899.
We therefore have 3 separate tournaments with 3 winners of these rating tiers:
Tournament 1: 0-1499
Tournament 2: 1500-1899
Tournament 3: 1900 and above
Players who try to manipulate their rating to join a more favorable tier (called "sandbagging") will be disqualified.
The size of the prize pools will again depend on how many players will end up in those groups. To be more exact, how many will be qualifying for prizes, because it doesn´t matter if e.g. 10 players are in a table who played only once. In this season again you need to play 6 out of 12 rounds to earn a prize, to incentivize regular players over occasional ones.
Again I encourage any tournament or streaming report to set
Round 1
Time Mode: 5+2 (5 minutes per game, 2 sec. increment), 70 min. arena
Tournament Link: https://lichess.org/tournament/qJH3wefu
Rules
- All players are welcome, also newbies, you just need a free Lichess-account and join our team in Lichess here (password is "Hive")!
- Every Friday is one round.
- Time mode is varying (5+0, 3+2, 2+1,...), sometimes Swiss, sometimes maybe Chess960 (Fischer Random).
- The winner of each round gets the number of points equaling the number of players in that round, the second ranked one point less and so forth until the one on the bottom of the table who gets one point (i.e. the Lighteye-scoring). In order to be counted, at least 3 games must have been played.
- In case two players have the same number of points, the one who played less rounds is first. If that is equal too, then the average tournament performance decides.
- PAYOUT: The tournament points of the 12 rounds are summed up. 60% of all Hivechess-related post rewards go to the prize pool (PP). Each of the 3 rating-tiered tournament winners will get "x" Hive (at least 50), the runner-up "y" and the third "z" Hive (depending on the no. of players in each group). The rest of the PP is divided among all other players according to the number of tournament points achieved (50%) and the number of rounds played (50%). In order to qualify for a prize you have to participate in at least six of the 12 rounds!
- If I don´t know your Hive username, you won´t be considered for prizes, so please let me know your Hive name in the comments!
Please share this announcement among your (chess) friends and colleagues!
The more participate, the more fun! And maybe some are even interested to join Hive and it´s Chess Community?
See you all on Friday and good luck!
(just let me know if you don´t want to get the mentions)