2 questions about rating tournaments

First question, when will norms be awarded for the tournament I just played in? according to the email I received it was officially rated at 4:44 AM on Friday 12/31/10. The tournament actually finished on the 29th of Wednesday.

Second question, I’m in the running to be on a top 100 list after this tournament result, but I heard they use the January supplement for the February top 100 list, and where it lists the January supplement my old rating is being used. My old rating is 42 points below my new one and it’s doubtful that I will get on the list with it. I also finished the tournament 3 days before the month ended, and it was rated the last day of the month, so supposedly I finished in time for the January supplement, although there were asterisks next to my rating until this Monday. Also after February I become too old for the age 18 top 100 list. So that being said, will my newer 42 point stronger rating be used, or the weaker one? Will I get on the list or not?

I assume you are referring to “USCF norms”. I would imagine those are issued as soon as your rating reflects the required level.

In regards to the February 1 supplement, that will be based on your rating as of this Friday night (the first Friday of the month prior to the next supplement date).

Jon

Norms on events (for the USCF’s norms-based titles program) are updated once a week, since norms are not computed on an event until after the event has gone through a rerate cycle.

During testing we noticed that a significant percentage of norms changed after the first rerate, but very few changed during subsequent rerates of an event, though it does happen from time to time, especially if there are corrections made to results from events, such as changing a game result from a loss to a win.

We normally recompute the norms (and update titles based upon accumulated norms) Tuesday evening, though sometimes that doesn’t occur until Wednesday evening, depending on how big a rerate we need to do. National Master and OLM designations are also updated once a week.

Milestone wins records are updated once a day.

I don’t know yet how frequently Victory Points data will be updated or where we will show Victory Points totals or detail. (I think I will need to do a rebalancing of all the systems tasks related to transferring data to the website/MSA.)

Thanks for the answers. However something even stranger just happened, Im assuming it had something to do with the rerate. My last tournament disappeared from my tournament histories and I have no idea why. However the 100 win milestone I received from it still remains haha. I also received an email saying it was recently rated again, and that the tournament would be available in MSA in a few hours.

That is because the re-rate cycle is done on Tuesday evening.

Currently the rerate cycle starts on Tuesday morning and is often done by early afternoon, though it may take several hours for the rerated events to show up on MSA.

As to why an event sometimes disappears for a while and then shows up again, the most common reason is that there is an error in the event that requires deleting and re-entering it. It sounds like that’s what happened here, because the re-entered event would have a different event ID and you’d get the notification of a recently rated event for it, as those only go out when an event ID is first rated, not when it is re-rated.

For example, recently I received a note from a TD who had problems submitting a double round robin event. (He didn’t go into what the problem was.) Apparently as a workaround he submitted it as two single round robin events. However, that could affect bonus points and norms. The only way to fix that was to create a new event with all the games in the same section and delete the other two events.

It is also possible for an event to disappear on MSA for a few seconds during the refresh cycle, because the way we handle that is to start by deleting the event, then re-inserting it. But that wouldn’t cause an email about it to be sent out.

Sounds right Nolan. The tournament is now back, my new rating still came out to the same thing, but there are asterisks on the results again. Makes me worry about whether it will be counted for the January supplement, but I suppose I will find out soon enough. Thanks.

I think you’re confused about when the supplements come out. The January supplement is already out. It only includes events that were rated by 3 December, that is the first Friday. Events rated by 7 January will show up in the February supplement, and after that they’ll be in the March supplement. Please note that even if you quit playing chess today, your rating could change in the March (or later) supplements due to re-rates. Hope this clarifies your confusion.

Alex Relyea

We always do a rerate just before cutting the next supplement, so that every event is in proper chronological order.