I have a friend who was a USCF member from the 1970s with an established rating. After a long absence, he recently rejoined USCF. Since he had no record of his old USCF ID number, he simply applied as a new member and received a new ID number. Then he started playing tournaments, starting out as Unrated.
By going through old state chess newsletters, I found a crosstable with his original USCF ID number. His old rating is 300 points higher than his current rating.
How do I go about reporting this? I’m not involved with any of the tournaments he’s participated in, therefore I cannot report the duplicate ID through the tournament reporting method.
Contact the membership department. Supply both IDs and names (if not identical) and preferably addresses. The odds are good they’re at different addresses and the older ID may no longer be in the system, so it may just be easier to add his old rating to his new ID. (It’s better if the member contacts the office than if a third party does.)
I had something like this happen at a local club tournament in the 90s. A player who had been out of chess for 10 years came back & played in a club event. I was able to find the old ID and rating in an old paper supplement. The cross table from the event came back listing the player with a new ID and treated as an unrated. I sent back to the USCF with the pertinent information. The new cross table from the event came back from the USCF with the new ID and treated the player as a provisional player, using the old rating like an established provisional rating. After that I gave up on the USCF getting things right. The player had played for a number of years in the 70s and clearly from the old paper supplements had an established rating.
Good luck in getting things cleared up.
Larry Cohen
President of Park Forest Chess Club [now defunct]
Well, in the 90’s we were on a much different system for handling re-establishment of ratings, and recomputing ratings for an event had to be done by hand. Our current rerating process didn’t get going until 2005.
These days it is fairly easy to re-establish a returning player’s old rating, even if his old ID was purged and isn’t reiinstated. All the office has to do is put in the old rating (and a floor, if applicable) and an effective date that is before the start of his first event since rejoining.
Hold on just a cotton-pickin’ minute. What do you mean by an “established provisional” rating? I thought “provisional” meant “not established”.
Maybe you meant that the old established rating was used, but was treated as provisional (i.e. based on only a few games) when calculating the player’s (and his opponents’) new ratings. If so, that wouldn’t be an entirely unreasonable idea, I would say.
I have had folks come back from as long ago as the early '70s, to fact the culture shock that the what
we now consider very long time controls, simply for the most part, do not exist, except in a very few,
usually major local, and national events.
But, most of the time, they indeed are true troopers, willing to jump into shorter time control hazards.
I think the furthest back I’ve seen anyone return is someone who was a member in the mid 60’s, though Judy once told me she saw a returning member from the 50’s a few years back.