My latest experience with lichess teams and their leaders

THE OVERALL PROBLEM

Single lichess teams are dominating every tournament.Many teams and team leaders get inactive and I think that ́s sad so with this blog and some other things, I wanna help.

The small problems:

• Advertising and swiss spam instead of work and creativity?

If you‘re a bit more active in the lichess team community you might have found a couple of teams which don‘t participate at team battles or send team message that can be called something else than advertisement of their prize swisses or just another version of begging for more members.
That would be fine if this teams would succeed way less than teams which create tournaments,invent new ways of leading their team or building a community,but sadly this can‘t be said that well because these teams sometimes reach thousands of members in some weeks.
These teams often use swisses to boost their team and get more members by,for example,saying things like „Hey can you please join this (prize) tournament?“ while the tournament is only accessible by members of their team to hide actual,pretty ugly, question „Hey can you please join my team?“
Did I say „ Don‘t join teambattles“? Well,let me correct myself: Don‘t join teambattles at all, OR only join teambattles when reaching some amount of members to make people join their team even more.
On the other side people use creative ways of tournaments or simple work to make their teams get big.
1 example are the STW battles by DarkOnTeams. It was something completely new but sadly the tournaments died after some weeks due to no one playing.

• Advertisement spam before understanding how to lead and manage a team.

These are just stupid and simple mistakes. Basic things like begging for many members but setting an entry code so people can‘t join easy enough, wasting your team messages for stuff like correcting a single grammar mistake of the last message or just simply spamming them thinking people will read them earlier then.
I could now give you pages of text where I explain to you how to really lead a team but instead I ask you to read this blog if you ́re interested in learning to CyberShredder's Blog • How to build a big and great Lichess team? • lichess.org
If you have anymore questions about it or wanna know my opinion about some less important things feel free to message me or to ask in the comments.

• Playing for the wrong teams in teambattles.

Teambattles are one of my favourite things on lichess and together with chatting, definitetly the thing I do most here.
They ́re a great way to make your small team grow or at least could be if people would change this point:
Very often it happens,especially in tournaments as big as TPR that teams have 10-20 and even more people playing for their team and scoring points which are sadly completely lost because in these tournaments, not all points scored by the team members are counted, maximum and normally, points of 20 players if it are less that has been set by the tournament creator.
In examples like this these player ́s points, at least of the winners team would have been enough to reach a top 10 position. If these points would have been scored for a smaller let ́s say 50 members, the less the better, this team might have won 20 members maybe even more that day.

Example:

Pictures from TPR NIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP 20 Team Battle #eV02lYzH • lichess.org

• Leadership.

Leadership is one of the points that are being mentioned in the blog in linked you 2 points ago.
Some months ago this point or at least the overall topic was so important to me that I posted nearly an intire blog about it which I put on private after some days because I didn ́t like it anymore for multiple reasons.
Here ́s a better and way shorter version I wrote completely new:
1 reason why teams die are their leaders. If they become inactive their team doesn ́t survive long because, sadly as I had to realize, most members are too lazy to check the teampage to see the chat or the teams next. You community has a huge advantage from the start if you have another good leader that cares about the team. Sadly I ́ve seen people who give leadership away as a prize of tournaments for example

• What you can do!

As a teamleader:

Put work in your team,don ́t think too much about members if you ́re working and getting creative they ́ll come anyways.
Create tournaments

As a team member:

Think about when to join for which team and if you should join for a team with 6000 members again while you see that their worst counted player has so many points that It ́ll be hard for you to reach that.
Like this blog so more people see it and think about the topic

What I ́ll do:

I will create tournaments that will be supposed to be build a bit more creative like little games. I would really appreciate if you would play there. More news about that are gonna come soon from the teams that are linked on my profile.