You Don't Get to Know Who Won the Titled Arena, Sorry.

i believe certain level of anonymity is nice - for players and for spectators alike. but if it is full anonymity across the board, it loses it's point.

spectators - they want to know which name to attach to the spectacular plays they have just seen
players - they want to know who they beat and who crushed them, and they also want to make it known that it was THEM who beat this and that other GM

on the other hand...

spectators - like a bit of mystery of wow, who is this guy beating everyone?
players - they like to hide behind an anonymous nickname to avoid prep and just have a game, to not feel the pressure of having to perform

so i suggest a workaround:

lichess should allow titled players (as they know who they are) to enter titled tourneys under whatever nickname they want to, unrelated to accounts. and then AFTER the tourney, the identity of their nicknames can be revealed by lichess.

this way, for the duration of the tourney the mystery is on, and when all is said and done, you can disclose who was who and let the wows and the oohs and aaahs and the bragging rights roll.

then for another tourney, they can choose whatever nicknames they want again...

All three winners anonymous "repeat offenders"?

An ethical way to discourage this behaviour might be to refuse payment to a winner who wishes to remain masked; a second way might be to limit them to playing one or two "titled" tourneys before revealing their ID.

I haven't really taken the time to look through every post made in reply to the article, so I do not know if what I am about to say has already been mentioned, but I still want to write this just to try to clear up some misconceptions (at least in my view) that were very prevalent in the first few responses I saw.

First of all, it makes little sense for top-level players to want to maintain anonymity for preparation-related purposes. After all, these are bullet games, and every top player plays literally every sound opening imaginable here (as well as a few unsound ones). Bullet play is so completely divorced from classical, or even rapid, that it makes no sense for anyone to even try to use these games for specific preparation against an opponent. Even if you would like to see how a certain player fares under time pressure (the only scenario in which classical play ever resembles faster time controls), you are significantly better off analyzing blitz games than bullet games.

Second of all, it does make quite a fair bit of sense for top-level players to want to maintain anonymity for other reasons. Ultimately, these things are personal and subjective: some players might enjoy a small break from their opponents knowing who they are at all times, since their opponents undoubtedly change their playstyle a little bit if they know who they are playing against; they might like the fact that they get to be seen as regular players instead of super GMs etc. All of this seems very reasonable to me, and ideally I wouldn't want to spoil this for them.

Third of all, it also appears clear to me that if we need to choose between allowing the audience to know who all of the participants are (but thus discouraging some really strong players who would have otherwise participated from playing) and allowing players to be anonymous (but thus angering some, ironically enough, also anonymous Lichess users who would have liked to know who the winners were), the latter option is by far the best one, and it's not even close. If there was clear evidence that publicly announcing the names of the participants who won actually increased audience investment in the event, then there might be a discussion to be had (although I doubt it would change what the proper decision is), but there is none; in fact, a lot of fans appear to like the mystery associated with not knowing the real names of the participants, and thus having to work it out on their own (or make some silly guesses).

Just keep it anonymous, I kinda like the idea of privacy first

lol who cares it's just a game

OH OK

Lol the title is extremely provocative to garner as much attention as possible.