Attack of the Clones 6:35pm Monday, May 18th, 2015 Share this article:

I wanted to look at the attack of the clones in retrospect and analyze some of my games.

Brian Wall was speaking fervently to me at a million ideas a minute. He was trying to explain a chess tournament to me where players can enter multiple times. If memory serves, he had asked at the Denver Chess Club for ideas for gimmicky tournaments. As we already planned to put on the Zombie Apocalypse, which generated its own buzz, we wanted to run another unique event. Kevin Seidler, a regular at the DCC and the Colorado Chess scene, suggested a tournament where someone can enter multiple times, playing multiple boards each round. The idea was in its infancy when Brian told me about it but his excitement was infectious.

There were so many questions, what should the entry fee be? Should it be rated? How can it be rated? How will the tables be set up? What about clone vs. clone? How should the prizes be structured? Should it be timed? What should the time control be? etc? etc? The key to tackling something that spawns so many confusing topics is to just take it one at a time. We finally settled most of the important questions leaving the outliers (mainly insignificant questions about rules) to be handled as they came up.

We wanted to encourage as many people to play as clones as possible. To encourage this we had two ideas. First was to taper the entry fee off the more clones registered. A single entry, for example, was $30 for DCC members, one clone $45, two clones $50. Second, we took an existing prize structure scheme, the humble pie, and modified it. The humble pie system is fairly simple, each game is worth a certain X amount of money. That money is allocated to the players as determined by the points. A draw is worth one half X and a win is worth the full amount. Our modification was to change each game to be worth 3X where a win is worth 3X and a draw is worth X. The idea was, the more games you play, the more money you win. Also, with the 3X it would encourage enterprising chess rather than quick draws.



The value of X was determined by a fairly simple mathematical formula. I took the net entries (total income minus expenses) and divided that by the total number of entrants (includes clones). That gives me the average entry fee of each participant. I then took that number and multiplied it by two (two players per chess game). I then divided that number by the total number of rounds and by three. This gave me the value of X where 3X is the total value of a game. As it turned out, the value of X was $4.14 and 3X was $12.42. We rounded these values down to make prizes easier to distribute. What this meant was if someone won all 12 of their clone games, they could win $144.

Astute readers may have noticed that whenever there is a draw, an additional X is missing. This X went toward the tournament expenses paid by the DCC including score sheets, rating fee, and TD fee (plus a small profit). Due to an amazing anonymous donation we were able to have a $770 prize fund despite a relatively low attendance. The tournament's complicated nature probably scared some folks away.

Now there were some hitches that we ran into while actually running the tournament. First, Shirley Herman, local rule guru, asked us several questions about certain rules mostly regarding players keeping score. We decided to go with a G/60 + 30 second increment time control to minimize the impact on clones in time pressure. Since USCF requires players to keep score at all times during a 30 second increment, we modified the rule a bit. Clones playing on multiple boards could forego keeping score while under 10 minutes. When down to one board, they would have to continue keeping score as normal. In addition, a player could ask for a third party to keep score of the games while under the 10 minutes. This only occurred once in the tournament.

Another big problem was we didn't schedule adequate time between rounds. It is difficult to fit 4 rounds on a single day at the time control we wanted. A two day tournament with slightly longer time controls would have been idyllic but we didn't realize the problem until the tournament was already under way; too late to make drastic changes.

Another important point was raised by Robert Carlson, a player in the tournament. Someone playing on multiple boards could easily mimic games if they were playing both black and white a la Darren Brown:

A simple solution is to force a clone to play the same color on all three boards but that seems a bit overzealous and could really mess up color allocation in the long haul. I contended anyone caught doing this should be forfeited from the tournament. I'm curious as to what everyone else thinks of this particular scenario. This did in fact come up in the tournament in the final round with my opponent. I'll talk about how we resolved it later.

Round 1: Let's get this Party Started

With all that out of the way, let me show you how I did in the tournament. I thought I wouldn't do too well this tournament. Brian Wall and I did a practice match with Todd Burge where we had 10 minutes with a 10 second increment. I did pretty terrible. On top of that I had to help run the tournament because I understood its structure the best. So I was pessimistic.

Going into the first round I was paired against Daniel Herman on board 4 and Cory Foster on boards 5 and 6. I had played both of them before and knew their openings and play style roughly. Daniel was playing on three boards, two against Brian Wall. Cory was only playing two.

Round 2: Trials and Tribulations



So I was off to a good start with 3 wins. But that left me vulnerable. Now I had to play probably my toughest round. I was paired against one expert who was only playing the one board, one junior who is so close to expert his fuzzy hair is tickling it; also playing only one board and one player near expert whom I have had extreme difficulty with but is playing two boards.

On my first board I'm playing Zhiji Li an expert in Colorado who is most famous for winning the U1800 section of the Millionaire tournament last year. Board two I'm playing youngster Andy Wu who I recently lost to at the Zombie Apocalypse tournament. Finally board three I'm against Mark Krowczyk one of my over the board nemeses (going into this game I am +3=1-3 against him).

I was on cloud 9 after round 2. Scoring 5.5/6 in such a ridiculous tournament is quite an achievement. Brian Wall was having a tough time as he lost a game in round 1 to Daniel Herman and was struggling against Rhett Langseth and Kevin Seidler in round 2. In fact Brian was stuck ping ponging back and forth between those two boards as his time dwindled. Neither Kevin nor Rhett was going to let Brian sneak a win. I noticed Rhett would move almost immediately after Brian got up to go to his other board. We tried our hardest to keep the clones together so they wouldn't have to move across the room but the logistics got a bit difficult when the clone pairings got too deep. Brian eventually secured draws from winning positions in those games but it did delay the start of round 3 quite a bit.

Round 3: Exhaustion

The third round started almost an hour and a half later than advertised due to the late completion of the second round. We actually had to adjourn the Seidler-Wall game because it was approaching 100 moves with only the 50 move rule left to end it. After the tournament they decided to agree to the draw being too tired to play out an equal knight vs rook ending.





My successes in the previous two rounds had me dreading the third round pairings and I was right to be nervous. I was to play Brian Wall on two boards and Daniel Herman on the third:

I was beside myself. I had played 9 games of chess in the last 8 hours or so and hadn't lost a game! I had already recouped my entry fee and then some (prize totaled $81 if my math is correct) and some of my games had been brutal tactical victories. I still had one final hurdle to get over before the day was done though.

Round 4: Coup de Grâce

Kevin Seidler was hot on my heels to win the tournament as well and that left me paired against him on two boards. The third board I was paired again against Zhiji Li, this time as black. Kevin was paired against Rhett Langseth for the second time. To keep the tournament more interesting for Zhiji Li and Rhett Langseth I suggested we swap the pairings a little and have Rhett play Zhiji Li and me play Kevin on all three boards. All four players seemed ambivalent so that is what we did. So the final round I was playing Kevin as white on two boards and black on the third.





Kevin and I had been showing signs of fatigue since the middle of round 3 so we weren't really expecting to put up too much resistance to each other. We even joked about making quick draws so we could go home. That wouldn't do for me though since I had to stick around until the bitter end to rate the tournament and dole out the prizes.





In his quest to end the games fairly quickly, Kevin started the round by mimicking the games on all three boards meaning I was playing myself from board 2 on boards 1 and 3. There was a long discussion between Robert Carlson, JC MacNeil, Tim Brennan and me about how to address this issue. I suggested forfeits for anyone caught doing it. The elegant solution for Robert Carlson was to force the clones to all play the same color across all three boards. I didn't think that was a good enough solution as there are some holes there and it could cause color allocation problems later. Since there wasn't an announcement and we are all (mostly) friendly people, I warned Kevin that if he continued he could get forfeited so he quickly deviated on all three boards.





The analysis on these games is a bit shallow mostly because the games are full of mistakes. We were both dead tired and doing our best but it is tough to play when tuckered out.



And that was that. I ended up winning $100 for going +7=4-1 in the tournament. Brian Wall tied me by winning his last three games. It was quite a tournament and just about everyone had fun. We were a bit worried there would be a problem getting the tournament rated since the pairings look ridiculous but USCF took it like a champ. I'm not 100% convinced the rating changes are correct but they don't see very far off if at all. Check out the cross table here if you can read it . If you are looking for a quirky way to bring life back into your local chess club or just want to try something new and wacky, give the "Attack of the Clones" a shot. I know we will be running another one, hopefully with all the kinks worked out.





Thanks to everyone who helped make the tournament a success. See you at the next brilliantly insane idea that seeps out of Brian's head.





-- Christofer Peterson