Is there any replacement for Ken Sloans’ ratings by state code " cis.uab.edu/info/faculty/sloan/ACF/ByState/ " it was a great resource to kind of see how you ranked in your state and also gave a slight view of the chess population in a state. It hasn’t been updated in almost a year. Is there a similar source somewhere else?
The current MSA doesn’t let you bring up people by state and doesn’t have the same search functions as the old site. Are there any plans to bring these functions back?
Affiliates and TDs can request custom ratings lists by state through the TD/Affiliate Support Area.
Are their any plans to make that information easily available to general membership? I see no reason why an individual Ken Sloan should have had to be the source of this information for so many years. I’m sure many USCF members would greatly appreciate having access to the list of players in their state
There are no plans to make the custom ratings lists (which are sent via e-mail) available except to TDs and affiliates. Anyone can download the Ratings Supplement files from the Members Only area and produce their own such list, as Ken Sloan has done.
The MSA revisions do include some provisions for limiting searches by state, but that will probably not produce state-by-state ordered lists.
That’s on the wish list, but is rather far down the list. (State by state Top 100 lists by age and sex may not be feasible due to an increasing number of state and federal limitations on what information can be placed on a public website.)
Shaun,
Your USCF State Chapter Affiliate, Oklahoma Chess Association, has updated the list published on our website at
ochess.org/members-clubs/ActiveOkies.htm . I checked to make sure your points lost to the fictitious MO Fall Open have been restored. Congratulations for being in the top 20.
Hope to see you at a tournament soon,
Mike Swatek
OCA Secretary / Website
In the olden days, when everybody who owned a computer knew how to PROGRAM it, these questions would not even have been asked.
It should be a simple matter, even in GW-BASIC, to take the downloaded rating supplement files and produce a state-by-state list. It would also be easy to sort this list in order by rating, and/or select only those members with expiration dates XXXX or later.
Bill Smythe
[size=150]Amen to that. [/size]
That’s right! If the current system at least let you search by a 200 point rating range for a selected state like the old system. This interesting and many times useful info would be easilly accessible. Since it doesn’t, then it seems that the list similar to Ken Sloans’ should be produced and made accessible.
I know that limiting membership searches by ratings has been requested, but it doesn’t appear that Laura has added that yet. She has added limiting by state to the development version of MSA, but not rating system ranges.
We’re planning to change MSA to use a better database engine in the hopes that it solves some technical problems at our ISP that we believe are related to known problems with MySQL, but that’s probably not going to happen until late April at the earliest.
Moving MSA to PostgreSQL is not very high on my development schedule, and Laura has limited time to work on MSA features as well.
My point was, that as long as you have the complete list in electronic form, it should be simple FOR YOU to extract just the states and expiration dates you want, and to sort the list.
Bill Smythe
Mike,
Thanks for the rating list. I took a look at the top two hundred Oklahoma players and have a question. One of the players I immediately recognized as one who died a couple of years ago, but he was a life member. I’m sure that there were several deceased players that I didn’t recognize. Is there anything to be done in such cases?
Alex Relyea
I wasn’t checking the active status flag, so deceased players and duplicate IDs were not being excluded. They are now.
However, there may still be deceased players on your state list if the USCF hasn’t been notified of the death.
The USCF will accept reports of deceased players from family members, from acquaintances if accompanied by a link to a published death notice, or from state officers, so contact your state chapter.
Mike - Tres cool! I moved ahead of you by 2 (very big) points. I’m going to bask in this until the Defenders of the Crown gets rated.
Tom
ratings are a little outdated on it, but much appreciated!
Darn, I may have to play a game or two to get back above you!
What’s truly sad, Tom, is that back when I was still a 1500 player, I wasn’t even in the top 100 in Nebraska.
There used to be a half dozen active Masters in Nebraska, now only one of the four listed has played in nearly five years. (And Paul Rohwer, the last I knew, was at Columbia and playing mostly in New York, though he should have graduated from college by now.)
No, actually the ratings there are the CURRENT PUBLISHED ratings, which are still the February 2005 ratings until Friday.
Mike Nolan
I enhanced the state ratings list so that it can show both the current official published rating (which is still the February 2005 list until Friday) or include any upcoming published ratings.
BTW, Tom, as of Friday I’m back ahead of you by 6 points again!. 
It’s actually not that difficult, though the “old” rating site was more convenient. You can open the DBF file in Excel (or any spreadsheet), sort by state and rating, then pull out the ones you want to a new file. The awkward part is that you usually can’t fit the entire list onto a single “worksheet,” so you might have to cycle through two or three. BTW, the only state that still has problems with this is California – Northern and Southern are separate State Chapters, but there is no way to distinguish the players in the DB.
John, we have N Cal and S Cal coded in our internal records, but that’s
not currently part of the MSA records so there’s no way to separate them.
We could add that information to MSA (possibly when we move it to use a PostgreSQL database engine) which would result in completely separate ratings lists for the two state chapters.
I’ve had a few other situations where it would have been useful to have the N Cal and S Cal members noted.