Hi !
Can anyone out there inform me as to the best program out there for submitting rating reports to the USCF, like Swiss Sys ? Or is the USCF going to come up with its own, and perhaps I should wait ? I really don’t need the help with pairngs, but would love to be able to dispatch results electronically. I want something that will just upload at the touch of a button. I just hope this isn’t a Holy Grail ! Thanks !
Tom Hartmayer
I don’t envision the USCF coming up with its own program to create uploadable files with tournament results.
You currently have two types of options:
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Create them using a 3rd party program like WinTD or Swis-Sys. Pair-Plus probably still works, too, though it hasn’t been updated in many years and as far as I know Jo has ceased working on it. There are other developers working on 3rd party tools for pairing or entering results, including one for a Linux environment, I believe.
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Enter them online using the online web form. That’s pretty much what the office staff has to do if you mail in paper reports, incidentally.
There’s a possibility of a third option, a template written in something like Excel or even Access that either creates the dBase files or a tab-delimited file when that format is finalized. I know at least two TDs who have expressed an interest in creating such a template. (A skilled Access developer should be able to put together a fairly sophisticated club management program that dealt with a lot more than just tournaments.)
SwissSys will let you enter results from a paper tournament so you can generate a rating report (). However, it sounds like what you want is a one-click auto-upload feature interfacing with the USCF’s new on-line rating program. At present, it doesn’t exist. It is possible that someone will write an applet for this, but the market is pretty small. The most likely place for it to turn up is in a future upgrade of SwissSys or WinTD. If this is a feature you really want, you should query the creators of SwissSys (estima@estima.com).
One of the differences between online submission and diskette/paper submission is that the TD still has more work to do once the event is uploaded. There are generally a few errors to be corrected, there may also be warnings about potentially bad IDs that have to be reviewed and either corrected or indicated as being OK to rate as is.
In the past, only the office was aware of the problem holding up an event , though sometimes they had to contact the TD to fix them. But in general the TD was left in the dark as to whether the office had to wait until memberships were entered to put in any missing IDs, etc.
Now that TD is part of that process. If an event is being held up because of memberships from another TD’s event, the TD gets to share in the frustration of waiting for those other memberships to be sent in. (Some day we may find a way to share that data with members as well.)
Is it more work for the TD? Yes, but the payoff is that once an event passes validation it will generally be ready to rate, and may be rated within a few minutes. It also helps reduce errors by looking for potentially incorrect IDs. Several TDs have already told me of events where the new validation checks have caught bad IDs on events being submitted online.
OK. So what you guys are saying is that it’s OK to the USCF Tnt. Administrator DOS program ? I thought I had read somewhere on the website that it was not totally reliable ? Thank you for all the reponses !
Tom Hartmayer
TA produces the same output files as SwissSys or WinTD. (More accurately, the pairing programs were configured to produce TA-format tournament reports.) If the data you input is correct, the rating report will be as well. It is “less reliable” in the sense that you have to plug in the players, ID numbers and results yourself. GIGO. (It is also not supported any more, so if one of your files gets corrupted you are probably out of luck.)
Frankly, I think you can get the same result with a lot less grief by using the SwissSys “Armchair TD” mode.
Is it correct that Tournament Adminstrator is needed to update the rating supplement files in WinTD? I think I’ve tried to upload the files before without TA, and I got some sort of error (it’s been awhile, so I don’t recall exatly what).
So, if TA is required, why is it no longer supported?
Does Swiss-Sys require TA?
Currently, I have TA on my system, but if it’s not needed, I’d just as soon remove it.
It is definitely not needed for SwissSys. I don’t use WinTD for updates, but I am 99% certain that TA is not required for that either. Note, however, that if you installed the database in a folder associated with TA back in the dark ages, you had better not delete the DB files along with TA.
I haven’t had much experience with WinTD, but as far as I can tell you don’t need TA to run it.
In that case, with the new online rating report form available through TD/A, I can’t think of any reason to use TA at all, and the USCF has no plans to update it.
Later: I ran a test, and, as I expected, there is no connection between TA and the WinTD database update function. However, as I noted above, if you installed the USCF DB back in the Tournament Administrator days, they are probably the same directory.
Nolan wrote:
- Enter them online using the online web form. That’s pretty much what the office staff has to do if you mail in paper reports, incidentally.
So I can enter tournaments online manually without a SwissSys generated file? If this is so, I certainly want to do this my next tournament!
For the size tournaments we are holding in Asheboro, NC, I don’t see a pairing program as much of a necessity…yet!
Please advise…thanks
W.T. Hales
WinTD works just fine for updating the files with the bi-monthly rating supplements that you can download from uscf.org. You just need to make sure that you tell WinTD where your files to be updated (taratsub.dbf, etc…) are located. By default I believe both WinTD and SwissSys look for the files to be updated in a folder on the “C” drive called TNMTADMT (a leftover from the TA days); however, you can change that on the pull down menus provided by both programs (“file” on WinTD and “database” on SwissSys).
Tim Just
Yes, though it’s not exactly obvious. Go down to the bottom of the Upload page and select “Enter New Tournament.” After you have typed in the tournament information, it will give you a crosstable, in which you must enter the player names, IDs, and results.
At this time I have SwissSys 6.0, so how can I make the files and send them online? Since the online rating system came online, have built the crosstables online.
Use . You should also create a crosstable for upload with . (This is assuming that you ran the tournament with SwissSys. If you are trying to enter a tournament you did by hand in order to generate a rating report, you have to enter the data first through .)
Yes do have SwissSys 6.0. Have been at play with it for some time, but I have found its’ not a happy camper when I need to change pairings.
Douglas,
Switching pairings in SwissSys is easier than you think. Click on they magnifying glass icon (or, f8–or, Pairings-view pairings/enter Results). At the top of the list of pairings is a button with arrows, one pointing left and the other pointing right. I believe there is also an “s” printed on the same button. Click that button. Click the name of the first player you want to switch a pairing for. Click the name of the second player you want to switch with the first player. Like magic they switch spots on the pairings list. Do as many of these as you need. Last, click on that double arrow button again. Save.
Tim
Yea it’s simple with SwissSys. As they said, write your “Report to USCF” to your hard drive. It will create three dbf files. You then write your “Save crosstable as text” in the same directory.
Then when you upload your tournaments online, those are the only four files you need. It’s easier than walking over to your desk and getting out your $2 stamp.