I am about to rate a club tournament that has been held over 3 months (2 games per month). Will the games re-rate tournaments held in between those dates, or will the event simply effect the most current rating. My students were curious as am I.
I appreciate the help in advance.
-Shaun
There are probably other ways of ordering events before rating them, but this is the sort order we use:
Event Ending Date
Event Starting Date
Event ID
Section Number
That means your event will most likely use the most recent post-event rating for each player that is before the event ending date, even though that may be well after the starting date of your event. (That’s also why we recommend that events that last more than about 6 weeks be broken into multiple events for rating purposes.)
#3 is there to guarantee us a consistent order. Otherwise if there were two independent events that both started and ended on the same day, we would not have a guaranteed consistent order to put them in.
Of these, only the section number is under the control of the TD. A TD who holds two sets of quads on the same day (such as one in the morning and another one in the afternoon) and then submits them as one event with multiple sections has to make sure to number the sections so that the morning ones have lower section numbers than the afternoon ones.
Nolan, I obviously get the gist of what you’re saying but can you clarify that with an example please.
OK, lets say we have the following events:
Event 1 begins Jan 1 and ends Jan 31
Event 2 section 1 begins Jan 15 and ends Jan 16
Event 2 section 2 begins Jan 15 and ends Jan 15
Event 2 section 3 begins Jan 16 and ends Jan 16
Event 2 section 4 begins Jan 16 and ends Jan 16
Event 3 begins Jan 10 and ends Jan 31
Event 4 begins Jan 30 and ends Jan 31
Event 5 begins Jan 31 and ends Jan 31
Event 6 begins Jan 16 and ends Jan 16
Event 7 begins Jan 15 and ends Jan 15
These events will be rated in this order:
Event 2 section 2 (earliest end date)
Event 7 (higher event ID than event 2 section 2)
Event 2 section 1 (earliest start date for events ending on this date)
Event 2 section 3
Event 2 section 4 (higher section number than Event 2 section 3)
Event 6 (higher event ID than Event 2 section 4)
Event 1 (earliest start date for events ending on this date)
Event 3
Event 4
Event 5
Mostly, you just need to know that tournaments are rated by end date. I didn’t even know how they were sorted otherwise, so that’s nice to know, but 95% of the time, it doesn’t matter. Most clubs around here run events that are one game per week for four weeks, so we get these questions all the time, especially from the people who go to all three clubs that do those kinds of tournaments.
So to give you a simpler example than above, you said you had a two month tournament. Say it started the weekend of Jan 12, and ends the weekend of March 1. Now assume that some of the players also competed in a tournament last weekend (Feb 23 - Feb 24). Last weekend’s tournament gets rated before your longer tournament, because the Feb 24 end date comes before the March 1 end date. With different end dates, the start dates don’t matter.
Here’s a simpler example:
An organizer holds morning quads, with rounds at 10:00, 11:00, and 12:00. Then he holds afternoon quads, with rounds at 3:00, 4:00, and 5:00. Some players play in both tournaments. To get these players’ morning games rated before their afternoon games, you’d have to give the morning sections lower section numbers than the afternoon sections (if you submit both events as a single multi-section event).
Bill Smythe
And to extend Bill’s example, if the TD submits them as two separate events, then the event IDs will decide which one gets rated first, because both events will have the same starting and ending dates, so the one with the lower event ID will be rated first.
Because event IDs are assigned when the event is uploaded, MOST of the time that will be the event that is uploaded first, but not always.
The first 8 digits of the event ID are the ending date of the event, the last 4 digits of the event ID are a counter that wraps around every 999 events (the last digit is always ‘1’ at this time) so there’s a small chance that a wrap could occur between when the first event is uploaded and when the second event is uploaded.
Wouldn’t that be every 9999 events?
If the counter starts over at 0000 with each new ending date, this couldn’t happen until there are 10000 events ending on the same date, could it? And then, unfortunately, there would be duplicate event IDs.
If the counter just keeps on going, then the odds of two events getting out of order due to wrap are not quite trivial. If, for example, there are 10000 events per year, then two events (on the same date) could get out of order once a year.
Bill Smythe
No, the last digit is always ‘1’ and I don’t think the sequence will assign ‘000’, so there are 999 possible values to the sequence. (A last digit other than ‘1’ was used for events from the old crosstable/ratings system to make sure there was no way that system and the new one could have ever generated identical IDs.)
Moreover, the counter is not assigned based on the event ending date, it’s just a sequence in the database that is incremented every time a new event ID is generated. (There are other applications that generate event IDs, such as the TLA tracking system, and not every event ID from uploaded tournaments gets rated, either.)
The database function that generates the event ID does check to make sure that 12 digit ID hasn’t been previously used. If it isn’t unique it gets the next value in the sequence and tries again.
The only time the event ID ordering is significant is when two or more events with the same beginning and ending date involve the same players, such as the morning and afternoon events scenario. (And in that case it is significant only if the organizer chooses to submit them as two separate events rather than as sections of one event.)
Otherwise, if you play in an event in Chicago tomorrow and I play in one in Nebraska, which one gets rated first is unimportant, because there won’t be any players who are in both events. This could become more of an issue when we start rating online events, I suppose, because you could play in an OTB event during the day and in an online event that evening. However, you could also play in an online event at 4AM and in an OTB event at noon, and it isn’t clear how we’d know which event ended first.
This couldn’t happen anyway, could it, unless there are over 999 events with the same ending date? And in that case the next value in sequence (or any other possible 3-digit value, for that matter) would be invalid too, because all 999 possibilities would have been used.
Bill Smythe
I think it probably has happened a few times.
Consider this scenario, we’re at sequence 055 and you upload an event with an ending date of 2/15/2008, so it’s event ID is 200802150551. Several weeks later we’ve wrapped around, so we’re back to 055 again and some other TD uploads an event where the ending date is 2/15/2008. Since the ID 200802150551 is already assigned, it would try the next one, probably 200802150561.
I think in the unlikely event that all 999 sequence values for a particular date are assigned it increments the date by 1. Since the section beginning and ending date are always used as the first two ordering keys, that shouldn’t cause a problem.
Having the event ending date (which may not be the same as the ending date for some sections of that event) as the first 8 digits of the event ID does allow us a shortcut in MSA which not everyone may know about. If you enter 8 or fewer digits as the event ID when searching for tournaments, you can find all the events that have that ending date, or all the events in a particular month, etc.
I use this shortcut fairly often when searching for national events, because we haven’t always had consistent event names, so, for example, finding all the US Opens since 1992 isn’t that easy to do. Searching for events that ended in August of that year and knowing the state the event was held in makes finding the US Open relatively easy.
So the morning quads should be Quad 1, Quad 2, Quad 3, Quad 4. The afternoon events should be Quad 5, Quad 6, Quad 7.
Here’s an interesting situation. I had a player who played one game in a higher section (Championship) and won. Played the rest of his games in lower section (Primary) and got minus score. Because of the way I list the sections on Swiss-Sys Championship gets rated 1st. So the points he gained for his good result there, got wiped out by the lousy result in Primary.
Same sort of situation can happen when somebody is having lousy result in under 2000 section, gets a bye, plays the higher rated bye player in Open and wins, but the Open gets rated before under 2000. Anything gained from the upset in Open gets wiped out by lousy under 2000 result. Even more likely if player is on his floor where the bad result isn’t chnaging rating, but the one win would gain a few points. (It hasn’t happened to me. If I’m having a bad result in one section, I’ll usually lose the bye game in the other section too. 
)
It’s not the section NAME that matters, it’s the section NUMBER.
All other things being equal, section #1 is rated before section #2, which is rated before section #3, etc.
Why do you think this matters?
Does it make any difference whether I think it matters? Many players think even a single point matters.
Consider an established 1400 player who goes 2.5-0.5 against 3 1500 players in event A and also goes 0.5-2.5 against 3 1400 players in event B.
According to the Ratings Estimator (which will usually be within a point on something like this), rating A then B results in that player’s rating going from 1400 to 1487 (with about 33 bonus points from A) then to 1439.
Rating B then A results in that player’s rating going from 1400 to 1362 then to 1464 (with about 40 bonus points from A.)
I’d say that while most of the time, rating two quads played on the same day in random order won’t affect much, they should really be rated in the order they were played. Players learn and improve from every tournament they play in (theoretically, anyway), so they should be rated in the order they’re played, so their rating will reflect that.
Consider a player who plays a morning quad and loses a game because someone hits them with an opening line they’ve never seen and they don’t handle it well. During the post mortem, their opponent shows them some moves for how to play that opening better. In an afternoon quad the same day, the same player faces the same opening, handles it better, and wins. If those two tournaments were held on different days, that player’s rating would reflect the fact that they learned something and became a better player along the way. Shouldn’t the same happen for two tournaments held on the same day?
The problem is we don’t KNOW what order the events were played in, there’s no ‘time the event ended’ field, nor am I sure we want TDs to have to start entering that kind of information.
And that may not help for events that overlap. Suppose we have a player who competes in 3 events:
The order in which these events will be rated will be based on the event ending dates, so the order will be 1, 3, then 2.
However, some of the games in events 2 and 3 will have occurred before all of the events in games in event 1, so there probably isn’t a ‘best’ order in which to rate them.
It also may not help for events played online, because the players may not all be in the same time zone, so they could play in other (OTB) events on the same day and for some of them that other event could be BEFORE the online event while for others it is AFTER it.
I was just talking about why I think it matters that an organizer tries to get their own “same day” events rated in the order they were played. Obviously, going by end date and letting things go random when it comes to different organizers, as they are now, is the most realistic option when dealing with the scenarios like you mentioned.
I was just those names as examples. I think what I mean to ask is making sure the section order on swiss sys is in the order that I want them rated. Usually this is not an issue for me. The scholastic tournaments I run have the same section names every time. When I create the tournament they go in as follows:
Championship
Reserve
Elementary
Primary
Novice
K-1
Those last two sections are unrated, so when I use the rating report utility I drop those two sections. When the results are posted on MSA they are rated in that order. Most of the times the order doesn’t really matter, but in that one example I gave I might have wanted to have Primary rated before Championship in order for the player to get the most benefit from his upset win in the other section. Is there are a way of reordering the sections at the end of the tournament?
I don’t know about SwissSys, but in WinTD the sequence the sections show on the screen is the sequence they are created in. If dragging a section to re-order it doesn’t work for you then you could always create new sections in the sequence you want and then do section merges (each from only one section) to shift the sections to the order you want them rated.