Are there plans to make the July rating supplement available? There are only three business days left in June.
I know the office staff is stretched thin, but I know that, as a TD, I (and probably many others) would greatly appreciate having the rating supplements available in a timely manner without having to post to the forums. (I noticed that there is a “May supplement out soon” topic, just two months ago.)
Maybe the rating cutoff should be the second Friday in the month instead of the third Friday, to give TDs and players more lead time before the start of the next month and reduce the pressure on the USCF office staff to get the supplements out quickly. The third Friday of the month is cutting it close.
Absolutely not, as then official ratings wouldn’t be as up to date and accurate.
I know Phil was working on them Tuesday evening.
This month is not quite the worst case for the 3rd Friday schedule, but close to it, because the cutoff was on the 21st of the month. That means by the time Monday rolls around, it’s already the 24th of the month. And time is tighter because June has only 30 days. (The worst case, of course, would be when the cutoff is on the 21st in a non-leap year February, which will occur in 2014.)
It’s true that the ratings wouldn’t be as accurate, but on the other hand it would give the players a better idea of what sections they’d be eligible to play in. I had to move over a dozen players to higher sections in the World Open today, and one of them was very unhappy about it. For years the cutoff was the first Friday in the previous month, so making it the second Friday instead of the third Friday wouldn’t be all that bad in terms of ratings accuracy.
A few months back I made the suggestion to Bill Hall that we change the cutoff from 3rd Friday to 3rd Wednesday, as part of a load balancing on the databases server. (This would still have the cutoff be somewhere between the 15th and 21st of the month, but it would mean that the office would have Thursday and Friday to start work on supplements right after the new ratings data is available, rather than after the weekend.)
No action was taken on that suggestion. Once we are running on the new database server, we will need to reschedule the entire production workload, in part to take advantage of the speed of the new server.
The July supplement files are available.
I got the following message when I tried to download the July golden database from the archive chart (no problem with the link above the chart):
Not Found
The requested URL /supplements/GD1307.zip was not found on this server.
Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS) Server at secure2.uschess.org Port 443
Looks like the file name was missing a Q: GDQ1307.zip not GD1307.zip.
I fixed the URL, and it should work now.
Thanks!
It’s just too bad if someone is upset about having to move to a higher section of the World Open. He is now in the section that corresponds to his rating and the section he should be in. If the cutoff for official ratings was earlier like you suggested, he would have been able to sandbag in the lower section.
What often happens instead is that a player avoids playing in any regular-rated events until after the cutoff.
At the National Open there are prize limits for provisional players, so those players were identified with their number of games. The Golden databases do not have the provisional games, so they had to be checked seperately and added. When the latest supplement came out that checking had to be redone against the new ratings even though the time period for that checking had been compressed. Putting the provisional number of games in the group field (or an asterisk for non-provisional players) at least meant that only previously provisional players had to be rechecked and new players were readily identifiable for checking.
That said, I prefer the later cutoff solely because it catches more brand new players in the golden supplement. A one-week or two-week difference in when ratings become official for section purposes is pretty much irrelevant to me. True sandbaggers will work around the supplement deadlines anyway. Players can have unusually good or bad results and end up being moved to a lower section or a higher section with either cut-off. If a tournament is extremely worried about the rapidly improving player then it still has the option of announcing in its advance publicity that it will be using the latest, and unofficial, ratings.
Keeping rule 28E1 in mind, of course.
Oh no, now players won’t know what sections they will be eligible for when they send in an advanced registration!!! 
Also, a TD has the option to do this for there own tournaments but what about tournaments run by other TD’s who don’t do this even in cases where it would be appropriate?
Of course a TD doesn’t have any control over tournaments run by other TDs. I assume that’s not what you were asking, though. Are you planning on adding a rule to determine when it is appropriate? Surely you’ll grant that it is OK for any player to play in any section that his rating qualifies him for? How can you determine when a TD should assign him a higher rating (algorithmicly, of course)?
Alex Relyea
The text file links for the July Golden Database aren’t working
All of the July links appear to be working now.