I suppose the long holiday weekend may have something to do with it, but there are only three business days left in the month and it seems the June 2014 rating databases are not yet available.
Probably the holiday weekend, plus the fact that the supplement cutoff wasn’t until
the 21st this month. Hopefully Phil will have these up soon.
Phil says the files were posted to the website earlier today.
Help me understand the timelines for supplements. I understand that tournaments submitted on or before the Third Thursday of the month go into the next month’s supplement, which is typically availalbe by the first of the next month. So in this case any tournament not submitted by May 21 will not be in the supplement. Are TDs supposed to use the June supplement for any tournament that begins on or after June 1? Or do you start using it the day it comes out? June 10? I thought I had read somewhere onteh forums that you don’t use the supplement until the 10th of the month, but that may not be correct. Does the rulebook cover this? Is there a place on the USCF website that answers these questions?
Does the golden database include the most recent supplement? I beleive that it does. That being the case, is there any reason to use the actual supplement? Aren’t you jsut better off downloading the Golden Database and ignoring the supplements?
Thanks in advance for helping a relative newbie get up to speed on this.
The Golden Database will have the same current published ratings that you would get by applying the latest monthly supplement file(s), but a member doesn’t appear in the monthly supplement files unless he or she played in events and/or had a ratings change. (All players appear in the Golden Master File, the June 2014 fle has 834,223 players listed.)
That means new members don’t appear until they have a published rating, and ones who renew but don’t play don’t appear, either. And that means the membership dates may not be current enough to confirm someone’s current membership status.
I suspect most TDs just download a new Golden Master file ahead of their next event, but if we discontinued some of the ratings list files we upload each month, someone would probably complain about it.
The rulebook says that June events (ie, ones that start on June 1 through June 30) should use official June ratings unless the event specifies otherwise in advance publicity. TDs may use other, generally more recent (and usually unofficial), ratings information for players as long as those ratings are not lower than those players’ official published ratings in the ratings list specified for that event.
The guidelines for national scholastic events specifies which ratings list applies for those events based on the starting date of the event, and if different from the current official ratings list that will be mentioned in advance publicity, as required by the rulebook.
Many, but not all, questions are covered in the rulebook. The Frequent Questions document on the TD/Affiliate Support Area site attempts to answer some procedural questions (how do I do X), but it can’t anticipate every question someone might ask, either.
The best thing a new TD can do is try to find an experienced TD in the area to act as a mentor. This may necessitate working at several events, usually for free or minimal expenses.
Of course, I only speak here for the MetroWest Chess Club (MCC), although it is possible other clubs may have a similar practice.
MCC meets every Tuesday night. We have monthly tournaments, with new events starting the first Tuesday of each month. We meet at the Natick Senior/Community Center. Our equipment is stored in locked storage when we are not at the club Tuesday nights.
So, part of our “closing up” procedure on the last Tuesday of the month is to download the golden database for the following month and then index the new database in SwissSys. That means that we are ready to handle entries the first Tuesday of the month without worrying about updating the rating database first. (The first week is especially hectic for the TD staff, since we are in a crunch to process [usually] between 70 and 80 entries in less than one hour and start the round somewhere near on time.)
So, we look for the golden database anywhere between the 25th and the 31st of the month (or the 24th and the 30th of the month, as appropriate, ignoring February). When the golden database is not available in a timely manner, we have to make a note to update the database before doing pairings for the first round of the new tournament.
Tcl/Tk might offer some ability to automate much of the process of creating the various monthly rating list files (somewhere around 10 of them, depending on the month) and packaging them. That’s on the list of things to try to install on the new servers some day.
Of course the downside of using a more sophisticated tool is that even minor changes in what we produce might require a programmer with the skills to use that tool.
When I log into my TD/Affiliate page and click on “Download Rating Supplement Files”, it only has the supplements up to April 2013.
This was fixed late Monday evening.