I know I’ve written about the production schedule, which hasn’t changed much in 3 or 4 years. I’m not sure if it’s in the FAQ. (The FAQ needs better organization, too.) I just added something about it to the FAQ on MSA.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I meant US Chess uses those “unofficial ratings” for every event that it rates.
No, we use the post-event rating from a player’s most recent event as their pre-event rating for their next event. What other pre-event rating would you suggest we use?
However, each time we rerate an event, we use the new post-event rating from their previous event, so unlike a TD using unofficial ratings, we’re BY DEFINITION always using the most recent information available.
But the unofficial rating that a TD is using could be hours or days out of date. And if someone (like a player or parent) goes to verify that rating online, what’s on MSA may or may not agree with the rating the TD is using.
As a TD, I don’t want to have to justify the rating I’m using for someone, I want it to be easily verifiable by anyone. That’s why I always used published ratings.
At the Castle Chess Grand Prix tournament we allow players to play up one section only, and only if their rating is within 100 points of that higher section (50 points to play up into the Master section.) So, for example, if you want to play up into the A section you have to be rated at least 1700. We standardly use official ratings, but we also let people opt to use their latest unofficial US Chess rating if higher. So if the player’s official rating is 1689, but unofficially it is 1710 the player can play the A section. Every year one or two people will take advantage of this to play up in a section the player would not otherwise be eligible for. Since the latest unofficial rating is what US Chess will use to calculate the player’s rating from this event, this seems reasonable. Yes, a subsequent rerate could drop the rating below the threshold (1700 in my example), but the vast majority of time the rerate does not change the rating very much. We’ve never had an instance that I’m aware of where it did, in fact, drop the unofficial rating below the threshold, and we have never had a complaint over our procedure (except from people who want it to be even more liberal.)
And that’s a reasonable use of the TD’s option to use a higher rating than someone’s official published rating.
But that’s somewhat different than the TD using unofficial ratings (as of some arbitrary point in time) for everyone. That’s also permissible, providing that those unofficial ratings are all higher than everyone’s published rating. I wouldn’t personally do that, but others can. (And if I DID do it, I’d think seriously about trying to get a paper or digital copy of those unofficial ratings, such as by requesting a custom rating list, so that I have documentation of the rating I’m using for everyone. It’s possible, for example, to get a custom rating list of everyone in a state or a range of ZIP codes.)
You can also use unofficial ratings that are lower than the published ratings if you state in all the pre-tournament publicity and post or announce on-site that is what you are doing. I’ve used the unofficial ratings at the quad tournament I’ve run every month for the last 47 months and it has never been an issue and I’ve gotten feedback from multiple players that they like that the unofficial ratings are used.
Quads is a reasonable use for unofficial ratings because no one comes knowing what section they will be in anyway.
Just make sure you do that notification each and every time. I heard of a case where an organizer accidentally missed doing it only once in a multi-year period and that one time resulted in a complaint being filed by a player.
A problem for the players is when the tournament uses the official monthly ratings for determining what class section a player is in, but then uses unofficial ratings for prize purposes, placing limits on what they can earn. The latter is usually in the fine print and not necessarily in all publicity about the event. It takes time to plan to play in big tournaments. Hotel reservations have to be made way in advance to guarantee a room. Travel arrangements have to be made. If a player is in great form and moving up fast, he should not have to stop playing in interim tournaments before the big event so that his official and unofficial ratings are almost the same. This is true for up and coming young players who play a lot.
In using the official monthly rating for section placement and prizes, it inhibits not only the possibility but the need of “gaming” the system by tanking in one or more events, that is, to sandbag so that one’s unofficial rating does not get too high. Since we want players to play more, it should be the norm that players should have the official monthly ratings used when entering a tournament. Otherwise, there is too much of a yoyo effect in the ratings. The argument that using unofficial ratings “protect” the other players in a class section is poor as they all usually think they are underrated and believe they are “gaming” the system, especially when they are sitting on a stale rating. If we are not going to “protect” players from stale ratings, why “protect” them from active players who are outworking them? Tournaments are about money first, ratings later. When players plateau their ratings will catch up to them. It is strange to force them to keep their ratings artificially lower to get around the restrictions of the big money tournaments.
There is a serious problem when different ratings are use for pairings than prizes, regardless of what ratings or reason.
Alex Relyea
Pretty sure Tom means the CCA policy for big-money events that sets a prize limit for players who had a post-event rating of 30 (or whatever) points higher than section maximum in the past year. He’s posted about that before, as I recall.
i.e. a player with a post-event rating of 2032 in August 2017 cannot win more than $2,000 in the Under-2000 section of the 2018 World Open. It is in the TLA , though perhaps in the “fine print” portion for the tl/dr crowd.
Seems like a good idea for very large prize events, like the World Open or Chicago Open. The 30-point cap might be too severe, you could argue. For instance, my post-USATE rating will be 1898 or 1899, though I have been rated above 1930 in the past year. I see no reason why I should not clean up all the Under-1900 sections I can find.
I am an old-timer who reads the whole TLA, especially if it’s CCA. Oh, well. Back to work.
I wasn’t saying the expectation was wrong - just noted how it has changed even in the time I have been doing this.
I think Mike is right. When we complete the systems move (soon) we can change some scheduling because we will have more horsepower available.
Allen wrote:
Isn’t it amazing how expectations have changed?
)))))))))))))))))))))))
I think this applies to most of us who submit tournaments with regularity. Usually, the tournaments I direct are submitted immediately, but once about every six month’s ago when
I direct larger scholastics with a good many memberships, it can take 3-4 days to submit. And by day 3 after the event, people are flooding my email and voicemail wanting to know
when tournament will be up. I do remember when the standard was a few weeks to submit, and we saw the new ratings only when we rec our magazine each month.
But, alas, the dinosaur period is over.
Rob Jones
Not according to John Hammond (courtesy of Micheal Crichton and Steven Spielberg)
And there are still some people who mail in results (though on-line submissions need to have been done to take the SrTD or higher tests).
Something went screwy. My rating came back at 1901. Someone needs to do something about this. If I can’t win a few U-1900 sections soon I will need to go back to working for a living.
there are indeed - and we still have people pay every month to have crosstables mailed back to them.
I understand there are still some TDs who use pairing cards, too.
Until a few years ago there were some TD’s at my club, the Portland Chess Club, still doing this. Fortunately I finally got them to stop wasting money on this.
I don’t consider that using pairing cards instead of a pairing program at the occasional small tournament is a bad idea. I wouldn’t do it at a big event, nor every small one, but doing manual pairings will give you a good feel for how pairings actually work that you won’t get by just clicking a button on your pairing program. I’m thankful that I learned how to pair before pairing programs existed.
I know of one SrTD with a fair amount of experience whose primary and back-up computers both crashed during a tournament forcing him to pair by hand, and he didn’t know what he was doing. It took him forever to come up with pairings for the next round, and what he came up with could charitably be described as “not best.” I also remember a discussion I had with an experienced LTD that made it clear he didn’t know even the basic rules for creating pairings.
There are times when the old ways are the best. For example, both major pairing programs fall into the 6-player trap regularly.
Bill Smythe