The first bulk rerate is under way, and so far it looks good.
I am going back to around the 21st of May in this rerate, a total of 10,678 sections.
I’d still like to go back to the beginning of 2004 so that I pick up most of the players whose old rating got ‘lost’ due to some conversion issues with the new membership system, but there are some bad IDs in events in early 2004 that I have to get cleaned up first.
As I had expected, it will take around 1/2 hour for each month being rerated, so this run should take somewhere around 5 hours to complete.
I will review it carefully before posting the re-rated events to MSA, but I hope to be able to get them posted late tonight or early on Monday so that I can get the ratings system turned back on for new events.
This is great! Now the tournaments are in order and the ratings after each one seem to be correct! I had a small scholastic tournament yesterday, submitted the memberships and the report last night, and it is already rated! Great!!! Keep up the good work!
One problem I do see is that the new rating of players with previous Provisional ratings or previously unrated do not show as Provisional. That is, if the previous rating was 786P4 and now is 800 after four more games, it should be listed as 800P8. My concern with this is that if the system does not recognize that new rating of 800 to be based on only 8 games, the rating computation will not be correct, particularly if the player performs well above or below that, next time – the change (if based on an established rating) will be a lot less, of course. Just an observation, although I am sure you are working on that already. Anyway, thanks again!
We may have some happy people and some unhappy people. I went from being pretty sure I would be 1865+ after my last couple of tournaments got rated to hoping I will over 1850 by the time my last couple of tournaments get rated. Pretty crushing if you know you have a big tournament or two coming up and you were hoping to break 1900 for the first time in 10 years!
Of course I’m sure the ratings are technically more accurate now that events are rated in order, but I hope that we are somehow QA’ing this to make sure that the ratings over everyone as a whole didn’t just drift down.
I checked a few people I know and most everyone seemed to have drifted down rather than up.
Here’s hoping we re-rated as far back as we’re going to re-rate!
Douglas, I’ll try to run an analysis of the pre and post-rerate ratings and see if there’s any trend. The dozen or so I checked all went up, some as little as one point, some as much as 40 points. A number of them were young players, it may make more sense for them to have gone up.
You’re probably correct that most people whose rating went up will be delighted with the new system and most whose rating went down are more likely to be less than thrilled.
I printed out a copy of the crosstable for my latest tournament before the re-rate. Checking it against the new ratings, it looks like 7 people went up, 9 went down, and 2 were unchanged. I lost six points.
The first re-rate looks to be fine. Some players will go up and some will go down, its’ just a flip of a coin. The problem of a re-rate would be the problem of their published rating supplement, and the Annual Rating List. Number of people do not look at the rating supplements when they become outdated, or their rating has changed.
Players that do have a rating floor, understand what was their best rating they had. If someone had a established rating of 1601 in the 2004 Annual Rating List. Its’ published as 1601 and the player has faith of having a rating floor of 1400. With the re-rate, the best post rating would be 1599, making the player not have a rating floor of 1400. Its’ very simple to say the player should still be at the high 1500’s or still at 1599. It would make a number of the players very unsecure what their rating is in the first place.
With the re-rate it would make the use of the published rating list with less value. If that same player goes to a director that use paper and the 2004 Annual Rating List. The annual list would show the player with a published rating of 1601, and the re-rate changed the player to 1599. If the director can use the computer, would show the player at 1599 and let the player in the under 1600 section. Without the computer the director would not let the player in the under 1600 section, as the annual list show 1601.
With the re-rate, it has placed a nail in the coffin for directors to use paper. Even if the director sends in a paper tournament report within the 7 days. It could take six months before that paper tournament report would be rated. The stronger players, knowing when its’ rated it would be placed into order. So that players rating can change, making the player at or near a new rating floor unsure what their rating is.
If someone is a very strong, and want to make sure you’re rating is secure. Why go to a director that sends in paper tournament reports. It can take half a year before the paper tournament report is rated. Until that tournament is rated, would not have a secure understanding of you’re rating and how directors place you till the event is rated. Until that paper tournament is rated and become official, it can take almost a whole year. Just because you as a player went to a event that had a director that sent in the tournament on paper.
With the re rate of tournaments, with the rating department needing months to rate a single paper tournament. For players going to a tournament that has a director use paper, it will make the players unsecure what their ratings going to be for months.
I believe that once we get the new staff trained in Tennessee and have a chance to work off the current backlog, we should be able to rate events within a week of when they are received in the mail.
I don’t think the TDs who submit their reports on paper are going to be affected as much as those who send in diskettes.
Last April I had a tournament that (for some reason) didn’t get the last round rated. It was a Grand Prix event, but I don’t think that changed. Is there a way that I can fix that and get the tournament rerated?
Another thing. My wife has directed eight tournaments, but all the ones that she has assistant directed have disappeared. I think that I have too few tournaments as well. Is this a consequence of the bulk re-rates, and what can we do about it?
We’re still a few weeks away from having the corrections module ready for release, but once we get to that stage you should be able to put in your missing round.
On the assistant TD issue, as far as I know I didn’t lose any data there. E-mail me some event IDs and I can check on them.
I have a tournament where for whatever reason the last round wasn’t rated. It’s probably because I’d entered results into SwissSys but didn’t click save before I exported.
What the USCF staff did was add a new tournament that was the 4th round only in the section that was missing it. When the corrections module is online will it be possible to delete that 4th round tournament and just correct the original one? That would make the tournament listing cleaner.
That would be great for the director being able to do corrections. Looking at the review of a previously rated tournament, it stops at the tournaments of the old rating system. Looking at the previously rated tournaments, only the ‘chief tournament director’ has the only right to make the corrections. When the corrections are online, how much corrections can be done?
Decisions on who can make changes and what changes we will permit have yet to be made. I think it is likely that the chief TD and the sponsoring affiliate will both be able to make changes to their events. I’m still working on what kind of controls we need there.
I think we will restrict changing the chief TD and affiliate ID fields to USCF office staff. That’s mostly to cut down on the liklihood of some types of mischief if the affiliate and the TD have a falling out down the road.
I think we will have to restrict changes to Grand Prix information to the office as well.
The event ending date cannot be changed, but in the new rating system it really isn’t used for anything other than to set the USCF event ID.
Some fields can be changed without affecting the ratings from the event, such as the city/state/zip, section name, etc.
Others will affect the ratings from the event: Any ID or results field, the rating system and K-factor, and a couple that might not be so obvious: section beginning and ending date (those two affect the sequencing of the event, so a change to either of them could change the pre-event ratings.)
Mike:
As far as event ending date is concerned you might try a Tournaments Received Search selecting Any and 2005.
The first four events that show up (1 in Japan and 3 in KS) all show future end dates. Somebody needs to be able to correct these dates as these four events have headed the list for over a month now. Most likely, these events ended in December 2004.
There are a few name changes I would like to do for the events. One is the ID number: 981227991, as the name of the event is called Florida-Forsy,the Match, it should be Florida - Forsythe Match. Other then that, there are a few minor changes with the tournament history. Just with the data fields of sections, city/state/zip, ect.
Please forgive me for quoting my own post, but I think that I figured out what has happened. For some reason, the tournaments that have been rerated have had the assistant TDs removed from the MSA pages. I’m being very unclear about this, and I’m sorry, but what I mean to say is that according to my TD tab on the MSA I haven’t been an assistant TD since 28 March, ie before the bulk rerates began. Is that an intended consequence, that the MSA page will only display tournaments in which you were the chief TD, or an unintended consequence?
We probably just don’t have that field in the new program that updates MSA. The data is still in our internal database, we’ll get the MSA transfer program fixed some time. There are several other things that broke with MSA on the new rating system as well. They’re also being worked on.
