Hi I just played in a tournament and I want to do an estimate of what my rating will be with the rating calculator. I played an unrated player and I’m not sure how I enter that into the calculator. Can someone help?
Well, what the real system does is calculates the unrated’s rating first. You could try that.
Alex Relyea
The Ratings Estimator on the USCF website works best when you and your opponents all have ratings based on 9 or more games, which is the point at which the ‘standard’ formula is used.
When there are unrated players, calculating the rating of the unrated player first, as suggested in the previous post, should get you close, but the multi-stage nature of the ratings formula cannot be reproduced by the Ratings Estimator.
Thanks. I can’t calculate his rating because it was his first tournament and his only wins were against other unrated players. I played 4 rated players out of 5 though, and I calculated my results with those 4, so I can just add on a few points to what that gave me. However, I thought it was odd that it said to put in the results total, and not against the individual players. I beat the strongest players and drew one of the lower rated, so that might affect my score differently than if I’d drawn the top rated and beaten the rest. How does that work?
In the formula, it doesn’t matter what result you had against which opponents. You can shuffle the individual game results around any way you like so long as you end up with the same overall score, and the rating change will be the same.
For a recent discussion of the score and rating topic, see
http://main.uschess.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=12889&p=183858#p183858
If your unrated opponent played that many other unrated players, it’s going to be rather difficult to estimate his rating, you may just have to wait until the event is rated.
Since you are his first rated opponent calculate using your rating as the basis. Example +/- 400 depending on win or loss. As his opponents play more games MSA will make adjustments to all the ratings and you should check it daily. Of course, MSA will make all your calculations moot.
Thanks for the advice everyone. I’m not sure what MSA stands for. When can I expect to see my new updated rating? A few months?
Member Service Area, but they may have changed the name. Try “Player/Rating Lookup”
Most TD’s send the report electronically and it is often rated the same day. If not it will be in a few days. At best, doing the calculations or using USCF’s ratings estimator gives you only a few hours lead time over the real McCoy. Interestingly, when an error is brought to the attention of the Ratings Department they can go back and retroactively correct all ratings.
Example, the unrated opponent you played may have played one week earlier. But, the first TD mailed the report six days later (which is allowed). USCF already rated the second tournament which you played in. So, the mail is slow and the first rating report arrives and is placed in a stack for a couple of days because of their workload. Then they finally open the envelope, rate the first report, and correct all affected reports so everything is in sequence.
Pretty neat, huh? 
Go to msa.uschess.org for the Members Services Area.
For the most part, when a tournament arrives in Crossville in the mail, it is rated in 1-2 working days, unless there are validation issues that require contacting the TD to resolve them.
Getting the event into the proper chronological order occurs at the next rerate cycle. Currently we do a rerate every Tuesday and on the first Friday of the month just before creating the next monthly ratings list.
However, keep in mind that the post-tournament ratings data on MSA is UNOFFICIAL. The only official ratings lists are the ones created on the first Friday of the month prior to when it becomes official. The current list (April) was created on March 5th, the May list was created on April 2nd and the June list will be created on May 7th.
Thanks for the explanations.
Alright the tournament has been graded and my new rating is pretty close to the value I was getting even with the unrateds not counted. How long before my new rating is made official? Will it be the first friday of this month that my new rating will be made official or will it be correctly regraded this friday and official in July?
The firrst weekend of a month is when the supplement is created with the official ratings for the following month. So your new rating will end up being solidified around June fifth and becoming official as of July first. The tournament might get rerated before June fifth and thus the official July rating may not be what you see now. If may also get rerated after June fifth and thus your pfficial August rating may be different from your official July rating even though you haven’t yet played in any other events in the mean time.
The current schedule is to run a rerate every Tuesday and again on the first Friday of each month in preparation for creating the next Rating Supplement.
As noted, this coming Friday, June 4th, will be the cutoff date for the next rating supplement. (Events must be submitted before around 11:30 PM CDT that day in order to make it into the supplement.)
New ratings from that Supplement run will start to be available online sometime on Saturday, though they do not become official until July 1st.
Ah nice, the rerates done. I got my first level 2 norm . The previous rating value had been off by one point it looks like. Thanks for the help.