Mangalia Chess Festival With New Scoring System
by Chessdom
European Champion Sergei Tiviakov wins with 23 points from 9 rounds
The 2nd Mangalia International Chess Festival, popular “Neptun”, took place on June 21-29 at the Romanian Black Sea coast. The tournament was exceptionally strong, with European Champion Sergei Tiviakov as top seeded, but the first thing that catches the wandering journalist’s eye is highly unusual scoring system.
Here are the tournament rules: each game bears three points instead of the “normal” one. In case of decisive result, the winner receives three points, the defeated signs zero. But if the game ends in a draw, each player takes one point and then they move in to play Armageddon blitz game (5 minutes for White, 4 for Black + draw odds) for the remaining third point. Thus a game can give 3-0 or 2-1 score.
However, in regard with FIDE rating calculations, the usual 1; 0.5; 0 system applies.
This extravagant scoring plan will surely cause lots of discussion, particularly in combination with the issue of Armageddon games, raised after the US Women’s Championship tiebreak.
Here are the standings and info.
In order to decrease draws, I suggested long time ago that chess should follow the example of european football (soccer) where the winner gets 3 points, while a draw gives 1-1 point to each team (player). That by itself doesn’t change the concept of the chess game itself. The disadvantage of course that this works in round-robin tournaments, it wouldn’t make any difference in a one-on-one match.
The introduction of the sudden death appears to resolve that issue, however, that does change the concept since one chess game turns into two chess games for all practical purposes. I am not in favor of that.
It seems to me that the system Gabor recomends would have a disadvange in a double or quadruple round-robin tournament – encouraging cheating. If two evenly-matched players had two games against each other, which has a good chance of resulting in two draws, they could agree that one player would win one game and the other player win the other. That way each player would score 3 points for the pair of games instead of 2, which would help both of them out in comparison to the others.