Board Game Arena

There are a lot of different ways to start this game, and all of them are valid, including the official original rules.

I have a feeling the answer is that there is too strong of a first player advantage in the standard rules to let it count for Elo, BUT

There are lots of games with strong first player advantage, including Chess, which still use Elo just fine because over many many games it balances out. You get to go first about half the time, and you win some and lose some, but overall, if you are better, you have a higher Elo, even if sometimes you lose to a first player advantage.

First player win rate average of Chess does not go over 60%, and still Chess tournaments swap sides in a series of matches.
In contrast, first player can easily force a win in original Pente rule.
The amount of advantage is completely different: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2585732/pente-balanced
I will never change the current setting. Period.

Perhaps having the original rules available for ELO games is too much (I haven't tried those in a very long time, so I didn't remember just how unbalanced they are), but all of the alternate openings are balanced enough, I think.

I understand your dedication to fairness, but I'm not sure if you know that it effects tourneys also?

If the rule is available only in practice mode, then you cannot select it at all when creating a tourney of any kind, which means that I cannot create a private Pente tournament with my buddies, using the starting rule we want to use. We play the classic tourney start, called "pro" in your settings here, and that's a good trade, we feel, between pulling some of the first-player advantage without adding too much extra complexity to the start.

I get that Swap2 is the most 'balanced' way to start the game, but also, it's really complicated, especially for newer or casual players. I run a group of more casual gamers who don't care about things like a 2% reduction in first-player advantage, and we really want to have a Pente tournament using the rules that we've using for playing Pente for 30 years, and it's frustrating that the option for the rule exists, but we can't play a tourney due to your position on the matter. As I said: I understand the dedication, but sometimes, allowing people to have fun the way they want is more important than making it perfectly fair.

I know you put a lot of work into developing the game so that we could play it at all, and we appreciate that, but right now, we still can't play our friendly tourney.

Of course I'm aware of it affecting tournaments too.
In fact, I voted for abolishing some word games' competitive features, including tourneys.
You can manually arrange tournaments elsewhere. I recommend Challonge.

The Swap2 rule gives a quite fairly balanced game, no ?

Swap2 is pretty fair, but it's also a totes different game, and my group doesn't want to play that game. They want a tourney using the 'pro' rules we always played in person. And they are all already on BGA. Convincing them to join some other website is right out.

We were very excited to see Pente come to BGA, but I guess it's not for us.

Is there a tournament option allowing each participant to play more than one game against each of their opponents? If there is, then you could have a private tournament where (by agreement) each player offers a pro rule swap offer when it is their turn to offer a position. Not an ideal situation for you, but better than nothing perhaps.

Am I understanding this correctly? There are no tournaments using the long-used "pro" opening restriction? Tournaments only use one of the "swap" variants?

'Used for a long time' does not mean it's better or fairer.