Question: Do clubs/organizers/TDs have the right to submit games played at Dual-ratable time controls as Regular-rated only? Or—in theory at least—must games played at Dual-ratable controls be submitted as Dual?
I know of a place where a majority of players (and the main TD) prefer to play fairly fast games to finish a rated event in an afternoon, but who also prefer that those games be rated only as Regular. Nearly all rated games played at this site fit within the Dual time control parameters.
As far as I can see, no one at this club cares enough about Quick ratings to question the Regular-only policy. I’m pretty sure there are a few long-time players/members who do not know there is such a thing as Quick ratings.
I wonder if this happens a lot, and if so is it “technically” against the rules…and if we should take the quotes off.
My understanding is that, if the time control is dual-ratable, the tournament will be dual rated. Have you checked any of those tournaments on MSA to see?
Prior to 2005 events submitted on paper had to pay a second fee to be dual rated because of how the office chose to implement dual rating. If that additional fee wasn’t paid then the event wasn’t dual rated. That was changed when the current ratings programming went into effect in 2005, and the second fee for dual rating an event was dropped at that time.
One way around this is to have one round that is not dual ratable, for example, Game/60 for the first 3 rounds and Game/61 for the last round. That’s currently permitted under USCF rules but is IMHO a violation of the spirit of dual rating. (And, really, how does dual rating such an event hurt any of the participants?)
The TD could also be submitting them with incorrect time control information, because if the time control entered is between 30 and 60 minutes per player, the event must be dual rated by USCF rules. The tournament validation program does check the time control against the rating system(s) selected.
If we can get our 2nd backup/testbed server working again (it had multiple disk failures over the summer, probably because of an air conditioner failure in the server room, and is still acting flakey even though we’ve replaced all the drives in it), the ratings committee has requested that I do some additional tests on it of some ideas to try to get quick and dual ratings more in line with each other. (I’m still not sure I fully understand the point of that, if the ratings aren’t different, why have two systems?)
How about tournament reports submitted on paper, the old-fashioned way?
On a semi-related note, am I reading the regs correctly that G/5 with delay or increment of 15 seconds or less can only be Quick-rated, while G/5 with delay or increment of 16 seconds can only be Regular-rated—not Dual?
If I ran things, no game faster than G/10 would be rated at all. I’m still not sure changing the time-control parameters of ratable events is within the authority of the ED. The fact that no one harped on this much—especially considering that Bill G. was ED at the time—likely shows how little folks care about Quick ratings.
Now we will have clock-move and capture-the-King games rated as Quick, if I understood the Rules discussion at Indy. It was inevitable.
Games from G/10 to G/59 would be Quick-rated only.
Games at G/60 or slower would be Regular-rated only.
No more Dual rating.
For a game to be Regular-rated, each player must start with at least 30 minutes on his/her clock, no matter how long is the increment or delay.
Time controls with less than 30 minutes main clock time per player AND delay or increment greater than 15 seconds would not be ratable.
The Quick/Dual/Regular boxes to check on the paper TRF and for online tournament reports would disappear, replaced by “What was the time control of the slowest rated game in this section?” That followed by a polite note that TDs caught reporting time controls inaccurately will be sanctioned.
Taking the pragmatic approach, I suspect only the last one has any chance to happen in this age of the world…
The method by which the event is submitted is irrelevant these days. All it takes to change an event from regular rating only to dual rating is to change one field in the section header. (If the event was submitted with the wrong time control and the wrong rating system, we’d probably update the time control information in the section header as well.)
Prior to 2005 a section could only be rated under one rating system, so dual rated events from 2004 or earlier are actually in the system twice, under two different event IDs. For example if you look up the 2004 Cornhusker State Games on MSA, you’ll find 5 sections that are regular rated under event ID 200407182470 and 4 of those same sections are quick rated under event ID 200407182480. (Those 4 sections had a time control of G/30 or G/60, the other one had a slower time control, 40/90, 20/30.)
As it cost the office additional time to re-enter an event submitted on paper, the decision was made to charge a second ratings fee for events submitted on paper. But if the event was submitted on diskette, it took far less time to re-process it for dual rating, so they didn’t charge the second fee.
You are reading the regs correctly, any event with 16 or more seconds of increment or delay is regular-ratable only. (Personally, I believe those events should also have a minimum initial time of at least 30 minutes, but I’m not on the Rules Committee.)
It is only the average that needs to be aligned, not each player’s quick rating.
You’d expect some players’ quick ratings to be lower than their regular ratings, and other players’ to be higher. Sure, everybody plays quick worse than regular, but relative to the pool, it should balance out. If I play quick chess “more” worse than you do, my quick rating should be lower than my regular, but your quick should be higher than your regular.
Instead, quick ratings are lower, pretty much across the board. I think the average difference is in the vicinity of 100-150 points. That’s what needs aligning.
For the sake of argument, suppose the TD writes something like “Rate as G/61” on the paper TRF, without saying the games were actually played at G/61.
Suppose that the few players at this place who care either way unanimously support the Regular-only policy and want nothing to do with Dual or Quick ratings.
Suppose further that all games played at this site are at time controls slow enough to be Regular-rated—nothing faster than G/30—and that all USCF tournament rules are applied, to a higher standard than is common for middling-sized clubs.
Is the above: wrong, a “winking” violation, a more serious violation, a common “variation,” a rare variation or inevitable in the real world no matter how these things are shaped in committee and workshop discussion?
Why don’t the players at the club want their quick ratings affected? It seems that there is no downside to this, in this case, except that the quick ratings will be more accurate. What is the counter-argument?
And…while you may think that “only the average needs to be aligned”, all should be aware that that is not what others think. There are serious proposals to limit how far a Quick Rating can differ from a Regular Rating. Despite the best efforts of the Ratings Committee, it appears likely that one of these proposals may be implemented.
After that, we’ll fix the Regular system so that the average rating is 1500…
If the TD does not include the rate of play, the rating report is invalid. An on-line submission would bounce. In the case you describe, a paper report would undoubtedly be read as saying that the games were played at G/61. If it were up to me, a TD who tried this and got caught would be reprimanded or demoted. In practice, of course, there’s no way the USCF can know what the actual time control was unless one of the players complains.
Something like 93% of the events are submitted online these days.
My recommendation to the office is that if a paper reports says “Rate as G/61”, they should send it back and ask the TD to indicate what the ACTUAL time control for the event was.
If the TD chooses to supply false information about the time control, he or she should be prepared to face sanctions if caught.
I can’t speak for these players in particular. In general, players I know object to and in some cases don’t ‘get’ the Dual-rating concept.
It’s not Quick ratings they mind; it’s the fact that Quick has encroached on the Regular rating system, in games that for many years—long enough for players to get used to it—were rated only as Regular.
The point is that before Dual ratings came to be, players could avoid contact with the Quick system by not playing in Quick events, i.e. G/29 or faster. Some of those players disliked QC but frequented events of G/30 to G/60.
That makes me scratch my head, but I know lots of players like that. In some cases it’s hard for them to find slower time control events that are convenient and affordable. Most seem to want to get in as many rated games in a day as they can, but only have it affect their ‘real’ rating.
After years of avoiding QC and playing a steady diet of G/30 to G/60 Regular-rated chess, these players suddenly found their Quick ratings rising or falling “out of the blue” when the Dual system was implemented.
To this day some players don’t understand how that happens. The fact that they shrug it off or ignore it shows how little most players care about their Quick rating…but the few who do care do not like the Dual rating system, in my experience.
They want Quick to mean one thing and Regular to mean another. This was easier when QC in its early days only allowed G/10 or G/15. There was a clear boundary then. (Plus that was before delay-digital clocks took hold.) Today it’s iffier; a QC event advertised as G/29 could be played at G/29, delay-3 while a Regular-rated event advertised as G/30 could be played at G/25, delay-5. Which is faster?
Extending the QC boundary to G/29 blurred the line between rating systems more than seemed proper to some. The Dual system eradicated the line completely. That was intentional, of course, for the greater good of statistical accuracy, but the few comments I’ve heard from players about the Dual system are all negative…amidst a sea of apathy.
Quick Chess at G/10 to G/29, as a standalone system, might be plausible. Extending that system in both directions to include G/5, delay-0 and also G/60, delay-5 is silly. Intermingling Quick into the faster end of the Regular-rating spectrum as a last-ditch attempt to make Quick ratings credible made some sense on paper. It simply has not worked in practice.
Given the above, I wondered aloud if it were proper for a given club, group of players and TD to collectively (and unanimously, among those few who care) decide to play rated chess at G/30 to G/60 but submit those games only as Regular?
I tried to keep the discussion rhetorical but Steve Immitt had to prove what 25 years of dealing with chess geeks and too many re-runs of “Ellery Queen” can do. I’m sure there are other examples: My question is, how many?
Numbers-crunchers: How about cost/benefit on eliminating the Dual rating system or Quick Chess ratings altogether?
I think you’ll find that many people find it to be ridiculous. If I’m not mistaken, the only reason that the latter is allowed is because of the “Four Rated Games Tonight!”. There may also be something there from the scholastic lobby. In tournaments that I am organizing, there will never be a deduction from the primary time control.
I’d have to think this is unlikely for two reasons. First, this would either make quick games (however defined) unratable, or ratable under the regular rating system. I’d have to think that there are very few people out there who would be willing to “risk their regular rating” at GAME/5. Second, I think there were as many as six proposals for additional ratings at the annual meeting this year. I think that there is popular call for more rating systems, not fewer. I realize that this doesn’t address the cost/benefit angle, but I hope that it is helpful nonetheless.
A quick forum search on “dual rating” kicked out the threads below, plus a few others. It would appear that griping over the dual system comes along every so often. Assigning a cost/benefit to eliminating the Dual rating doesn’t make much sense…for people who don’t play in <G/30 events, do they really care about their Quick rating? If they don’t care about Quick, why would dual rating matter?
I run game/30 tournaments at my club on Monday nights. We play 3 rounds and because we’re supposed to be out of the room by 11:30 PM I have to deduct the 5 minutes in order to get the three games in.
We have a similar situation at the club that meets on Wednesday nights. Most of the time it’s 1 game a week at game/80 but g/75 for delay. Again we have to be out of the space by 11:00 pm. We could have everyone play g/75. but we do have a few players who have analog clocks and there are usually one or two games using those clocks.
The dual rating thing does not bother me. The quick rating is meaningless to me. I have only played in one quick event where they actually used quick ratings instead of regular for pairing purposes. If I was going to play in a game/10 that was a side event it would not matter to me if they didn’t rate it all. Having it rated or not rated would not impact my decision either way.
I would object to having true quick events like game/10 be figured into regular ratings. The rating would have no meaning. That is the problem with the quick rating. It has no meaning because there are too many different types of chess that could be reflected. There is a big difference between G/5 and G/60.