How long should a director take to submit tournament results?
It used to take a couple of months before I could tell how my rating had changed from a tournament, but with everything available on-line I would expect a faster turn-around.
Maybe it’s unrealistic, but I don’t understand why the US Junior hasn’t been submitted yet. The final results (complete cross-table) have been posted on-line on the CPU Solutions web site since the day the tournament ended, a week ago (cpu-solutions.com/USJrOpen/j … letag=usjr), but I haven’t seen anything in MSA yet.
This tournament should be even easier than most because nearly all of the entries were made in advance.
I notice that the much larger National Open was submitted several days ago, for example. The old rule (if I remember correctly) was that tournaments had to be submitted with two weeks, but I thought this had been shortened.
With the online tournament results, had a few tournaments being done and rated before the last player left the building. If the tournament is submitted before 11pm, the ratings are done at the top of the hour. After its’ rated, ask for a tournament crosstable and check your email. Some players did know their after tournament rating before they went home.
The tournament should be submitted within seven days.
If you’re talking about the US Junior Open, it just ended on June 13th. The TD submitted the report online within 24 hours of when it ended, but there are several membership issues waiting to be resolved, including two players without USCF IDs. Walter Brown’s out of the office for an indefinite time period, so the membership exception requests for that event didn’t get reviewed until Friday evening.
The policy used to be 7 days, though this wasn’t really enforced. During the staff cutbacks, this was changed to “after all ID numbers have been issued.” That can be done quickly if you submit the memberships on line (and if everyone actually paid), but not all TDs are willing or able to do everything on line. The USCF should avoid raising unrealistic expectations of 24-hour turnaround in ratings. Note that the HB Global tournament (May 21-22) was not rated until June 17.
It does take some reworking of how the organizer and TD handle things in order to be ready to submit events as soon as they’re over. Doing a good job checking memberships on all players will help prevent that being what keeps an event from being rated quickly.
However, not all TDs or organizers treat the rating report as a high priority task. Bill Goichberg is one organizer who has decided that it is in his best interests, as well as that of his players, to have his events rated quickly. Most of his recent events have been rated within 2 days, several within 24 hours.
I think the HB event had a lot of membership issues to resolve, the last I knew Phil Smith was working with Walter Brown during and just after the National Open (both were on staff there) to get them cleared up. Hopefully the organizers will be better prepared next year.
Roger Ingless has already started thinking about how he wants to handle the Amateur Team East so that it can be rated within a week next February.
One thing that worried me about the online submisison process was that it doesn’t take long for players to go from ‘Wow, that event was rated in 2 days’ to “Why the heck wasn’t that tournament rated in 2 days!”
Nolan: Yes, it was the US Junior Open that I was refering to. I had checked to see if the tournament had submitted using the MSA “Tournaments Received Search” (uschess.org/ratings/RatesSea … Search.php). Isn’t this supposed to show if the tournament has been submitted? That’s why I thought it hadn’t.
I know I’m a little impatient – more so for my daughter’s results than I would be for my own.
Do understand what happens when the TDs/organizers do not treat the rating report with high priority. The players never come back. The tournament needs to be rated as soon as possible or you start to see nobody. When I have a tournament, its’ going to be rated that day or the first Monday when the bank opens.
The ‘tournaments received’ program only shows events submitted online when they are submitted for rating. In the case of the US Junior Open, while the TD has uploaded the event, it isn’t ready for submission yet because of the membership issues that still have to be resolved.
I haven’t included events that are stilll being edited by the TD in the ‘tournaments received’ list yet. I don’t know if I will, because we encourage TDs to upload ‘test’ events for practice. Also, some TDs will upload an event after the 1st round to have the TD/A system run a membership check, and I don’t know if I want either of those types of events, ones that aren’t intended to be rated, showing up on the list.
Yes – it’s the old “stand taller in the crowd” syndrome. One person in the crowd stands on tip-toes to get a better view of the parade, forcing everybody behind him to do the same, so eventually, nobody gains the advantage after all.
I suspect that having tournaments rated within 24 hours may still be the exception, rather than the rule, even for events submitted on-line. It might be useful to know: What percentage of events submitted on-line are rated within 24 hours? 48 hours? 7 days? 14 days? etc etc etc.
Looking just at rated events that ended on or after March 1st, 816 events were mailed to the USCF and 1034 were submitted online. That means that about 56% of the events were submitted online. (That’s skewed a bit in favor of online submission because it includes events that ended in the last few days. If I exclude events that ended in June, the online submission events account for 53% of events rated.)
Of those 1034 events, 164 were rated the same day they ended, 293 the next day, 99 on day 2, 81 on day 3, 39 on day 4, 33 on day 5 and 35 on day6. That means 744 or 72% of the events submitted online were rated less than a week after they ended.
130 events submitted online were rated on days 7-13, 60 on days 14-20, 43 on days 21-27, 20 on days 28-34, 14 on days 35-41 and 23 events submitted online were rated 42 or more days after they ended.
41 of the 816 events submitted by mail were rated within a week of when they ended. 294 were rated on days 7-13, 255 on days 14-20, 95 on days 21-27. 65 on days 28-34, 27 on days 35-41 and 39 events submitted by mail were rated 42 or more days after they ended.
Another interesting statistic. 56% of the events mailed to the USCF office were on paper, 44% were on diskette.
When I did my financial analysis of the USCF operations in 2003, I estimated that about 25% of events were being submitted on paper. Of the events considered for this analysis, 23% were submitted on paper, so most the TDs who submit on paper have not changed to online submission, but 75% of the events that would (probably) have been submitted on diskette were submitted online.
Apparently about 45% of events submitted on-line are rated within 48 hours – enough to whet people’s appetites, and enough to make people impatient when it takes longer. I guess players need to have a little more sympathy for the poor organizer who has to deal with membership issues, especially when a player has just expired, claims he has renewed, and refuses to renew yet again at the tournament.
TDs give receipts for memberships sold at their events.
Players bring those receipts to events. (There is a membership exception request category specifically for players who show a receipt from another recent event run by another TD/affiliate.)
TDs get their memberships submitted promptly.
Online submission will be MUCH faster, but the USCF office has been getting memberships processed within a day or two of when they arrive in the mail, so as long as the TD gets the memberships in the mail promptly, they should be processed promptly as well.