I last played in a tournament, I would guess in about 1989;
Where do I stand?
Would I need to obtain another rating?
If my old rating; and it was not very good; is still applicable, what procedures might I do to obtain it?
Thanks!
Have you tried looking yourself up in our Member Services Area,
http://msa.uschess.org
There are over 400,000 rated chess players listed there.
If your rating isn’t there, it is still on file at the USCF office.
Thank you Nolan, I did not find my name readily at that area; but at least I have some leads now. A Tournament was held this weekend and one had to be rated; it just occurred to me today, that I may still have been able to have a rating to enter it; but I’ll be ready next time.
Horsie,
If you would provide your full name, state of residence, and location of last tournament, and name of tournament if you remember (back in '89), perhaps we can get your info from old rating supplements. Mine go back to '87. MSA, I think goes back to '91. That’s why you didn’t find your name there. If you have an old Chess Life, that would give you some info as well.
Good luck and post back so we may be able to help.
There is a possibility, if your rating is not on MSA, that USCF may overlook it when rating your latest event, and you will get a brand new (provisional) rating. Somebody at the office should have their attention drawn to this situation, quickly, before the tournament gets rated.
Bill Smythe
Thank you both of you, Smythe and Evansville;
I had to say that; because once, I did spend some time in Evansville, I enjoyed it for the week or so we were there; most of what I remember was some barbecue restuarant and it seems there were some scenic passages by the Ohio River, it even flowing near downtown; driving through S. Indiana and Ky. what was that I remember seeing? Black houses or something, unique;
The tournament history in MSA goes back to late 1991, the ratings information goes back a bit further, I think to just after the purge that was run after they printed the 1987 Annual List, the one that was cumulative back to about 1984. There may be some IDs in the 1987-1991 time frame that were deleted, but I think I have most of the ID’s from those years, and that should mean I have the ratings as well.
Let’s assume for the purpose of discussion, however, that Horsie2000’s rating is one of those that we no longer have in electronic form.
What has to happen then is that the USCF office has to look the old rating up manually. That requires knowing some information, preferably the full name and the approximate date of that person’s last tournament. Having the addresses (or at least the city/state) that the person lived in around then also helps narrow it down.
A lot of it depends on how common the name is. We have nearly 150 Michael Smith’s in our online records, for example.
Ratings from the 1978-1987 time frame can usually be looked up in the printed supplements from those years. Beyond that they have to go back to the original rating cards, which are on microfilm.
Thank you Nolan; even if I am a fair score better than what I use to be; I really would have accepted about any rating to just get the feet wet again.
Since then, I am a bit of a distance from home, there I should still have a clock, role up board and standard type of Staunton tournament set and maybe some of the magazines as well. This may take a bit of time; I may have to write the office; but now, I’ve got some direction as to what to do.
The “Golden Database,” which I assume is the same one the old rating system ran on, includes players whose last published rating was 12/1979. Note that I am not asserting that it contains all such players, just that a few I spot-checked were there. It also includes the names, without ratings, of some players whose memberships were current when it was created (generally lifers), but who had not played for some years before.
Nobody seems to know why some records were purged completely, others were rolled out to the ‘expired member’ table and some were left in the active member table even though they were expired and had been so for many years. It may have had to do with other fields in the database, I suppose.
By combining the various records we had, the new database has ratings for around 427,000 current and former members.
However, we have over 592,000 current and former members in those records. That means we have around 165,000 (mostly former) members with no ratings information in our computer records.
It would not surprise me if a fair number of those had a rating at some time. I think the more probable explanation is that they haven’t played a rated game since we went to computerized member records in around 1978, but it is also possible that some ratings were lost from our computer records over the years.
That’s why TDs should always let us know if they have reason to believe a player has an old rating, even if they can’t find one.
I can name several, just from the days you and I were at Northwestern.
Bill Smythe