Snoopy: I would think that pawns would want to become members to alleviate this problem since they would no longer have to wait for the tourney to finish once they are a member... Instead they can enter as many tournies as they want! I highly doubt any pawn thinks this such an issue that they won't become a member... in fact it should only make them want to be a member more!

Ensuring that every tourney can be handled would be quite tidious, for someone would have to verify every tourney automated decision (likely), and as BK grows, that would only become a bigger and bigger job... The only tourney style that I could see an automatic system working for is single elimination, which could speed up the overall tourney time to completion a little, but for all of the other tournies, this simply isn't feasible since you have so many elements coming into play on who is going into the next round (S-B is affected by every other game, so every player must be finished in order to calculate the overall standings for all of the other players! Hence, tournies using that feature to determine who plays in the next round can not be started early.)

So long story short, single elimination might work well, but the others... not so.

rednaz23: most of the time SB doesn't even come into play. It's only a tie breaker, one can often find out the winner without calculating the SB.
A simple algorithm based only on the points (total wins) would be simple enough to implement (a sure winner is found when (s)he has more points than every other player in the section, even if they'd win all the games still pending). Like I said, it's simple enough to implement, I think, and still far better than not having one at all for many situations.

As it is now I have almost as many games going as I have tournaments. And trust me that not all those games are from tournaments, so I have many tournaments pending where I have finished all my games a long time ago (and in many of these it's obvious who the winner will be)

One more thing - this algortihm would naturally be executed whenever a game in the torunament was finished and a winner was not already determined for that section.
By the way, all the elements required for the algorithm to work are already accessed when a game is over - when you get a message warning you of the game's outcome, those elements are all there - points per player; games still pending per player; section winner (if already determined).

(CORRECTION as of some hours ago, I have more active tournaments than active games)

pauloaguia: that formula works well. I use it often on tournaments. I agrea it should be implemented. One of my tournaments has been running since january 1st but I know who wins every section already. and it still has not gone to round 2

pauloaguia: I support that 100%. Even when one is a black rook it is a bit frustrating to wait so long before the next round of a tournament when the last games have no importance.