Tournament feature which would be incredibly useful for coaches

The tournament features at lichess keep getting better and better! Well done, Lichess!! 👍
Not long ago, a feature was added that allows someone to organise a tournament from a given position, which is incredibly useful when you run a chess club or you coach a group of people and you want them to practice an endgame position, an opening, etc. This was a fantastic add on!👍👍
Another feature which would be *incredibly* useful is the option to have a starting position, say Q+K vs K, and have all the participants play against the computer. Since the games can then be downloaded, us coaches would be able to tell, very quickly, which members of the group can do checkmates with Q, R, 2 Bishops, Bishop and Knight, etc. not to mention hundreds of different simple endgames, and this would be something quite different than just playing a game against a computer engine...

Please support this topic if you're a coach or you think it's a good idea.

@chessclinic But then it's not a tournament anymore because the players don't play against each other... But you can create an interactive study with a custom starting position so they can learn it.

Not at all. You miss the point. If you create a study, how the student does doesn't get recorded and we can't keep track of their progress that way. Whether you call it a tournament or not is meaningless and matters not. It's a system which allows coaches to help the group improve. Then again, I'm not sure if the time spent on the game is recorded, in which case, you could consider it kind of a competition: Fastest at checkmating the computer, etc.

@chessclinic this is already a feature on chess.com ...

Which feature do you mean? how well the student does in the study being recorded? I don't think a study is quite the same though. It's pretty normal not to make the best possible move during a game, and still know how to checkmate your opponent and do it in 10 moves more, which is not a big deal, so that could lead to some pretty weird results.

@chessclinic ah ok I know what you mean now.

I am near certain that this will not be implemented, because a large player-vs-engine tournament would place huge stress on the servers.

Lego, that would be the case if the positions that you set up were full of pieces. But Tablebased positions (7 pieces or less) shouldn't be too hard on the servers. But also, bear in mind that with so many thousands of people playing on-line every minute on lichess, there's a small percentage of them which will always be playing against computers. Also, I believe you can have the computer using the person's cpu rather than it being run on the server? so that shouldn't necessarilly be an issue.