When I joined ICC in 2005 the Marathon was fairly new, it was fun, it ran every other month, and it was challenging. When I won my first ICC Free Month, I was so danged excited and thrilled. Of course I won it for playing in the MOST tourneys, surely not for being the BEST.
When I got involved in Tomato as a manager doing the marathon was such a thrill because it was one tourney right behind the other, and I could run up my Tourneys Managed numbers rather quickly. The tournaments were easy to fill and players were excited about playing. However, just as with life, things change over time. In an effort to improve ICC and also to keep ICC the leader in Internet Chess we started the Pure Pool system and everybody loved it and players play them all the time. So for the managers, it became harder to get enough players to start a tourney so it also meant that mangers wasted a lot of time, waiting to see if a tourney would fill. So many tourneys got and get aborted because of lack of interest so of course this was discouraging to our TMs. All of this began to bleed over into the Marathons as well.
Each Marathon slowed down in the number of players that played, the number of tourneys run, and so forth. We then cut back and merged tourneys together to see if we could help them fill quicker, It worked at first, but that too sort of fizzled out in time. Then we decided to cut them back to 3 times a year (every 4 months) to see if that would help, but that too didn’t seem to help. Basically that’s the story and IMHO, in a nutshell that is why we no longer run the Marathons here on ICC.
Please feel free to comment, send feedback, etc. to let me know your thoughts. Our aim here at ICC is to provide a healthy and safe environment platform for good chess play, so I am very interested in your thoughts and opinions.
Thank you for playing on ICC.
BillScotty
