Since we have switched to a monthly cycle for official ratings does that mean that the rating printed on the magazine will generally be out of date?
The ratings on the April issue should be the official April ratings, and so forth, so I would say that they are not out of date.
(I’m not sure if March was handled correctly, but I’ve already discussed this with Traci to make sure she knows to put the ratings on the C/L and CL4K labels that go with the cover date of that issue.)
I’m confused because the MSA shows Current Published
Rating (March Supplement)
Regular Rating 1644 2007-03
and on the March 2007 issue of Chess Life it shows 1599
I thought maybe the lead time to publishing the Magazine was the problem.
Also I had noticed for awhile some of the MSA on the page that shows the 4 tabs (General,RTG Supp,Tnmt Dir,Tnmt Hst) was showing the unofficial rating. So you didn’t have to go to your last tournament to see your rating change. It seemed like it only showed if there was a change. But after I submitted a tournament that changed them they seem to have disappeared.
Is this a part of the revamping of the MSA pages?
I think there was a misunderstanding with the March labels, the April labels should have the official April ratings on them. That’s one of the reasons why we set the ratings cutoff as the first Friday in each month, so that Traci can run the magazine labels the following Monday.
The most recent rating hasn’t been on the MSA general ‘card’ for nearly two years, in large measure because under our current hourly processing cycle for ratings runs (and also because of rerating) a player’s unofficial rating is subject to frequent changes (possibly more often than once a day.) That means the unofficial rating the TD sees at 6PM on Friday may not be the same one that the TD would see at 10 PM or at 9AM the next morning.
USCF policy is that TDs should use published ratings for an event, even in the case of players who have an unofficial rating but no published rating yet. When other procedures are used, they should be announced in advance, and even then players should be able to expect consistency in what rating they (and their opponents) have for an event. Using an unofficial rating off the website does NOT ensure that consistency.
With monthly official ratings lists and with 75% of events being submitted online within 2-3 days of when they end, IMHO there isn’t as much need for using unofficial ratings as there was when we were running ratings batches once a week and the average time it took an event to get rated was 21 days.
Our next tournament will use the Dec. 2006 Rating List since we do not have internet access at the tournament site. Other than having an invitational event where we can look up the current monthly ratings before the event,we have not found a practical solution to have the monthly current ratings available. We think the discontinuance of the paper supplements may cause some problems for small clubs like ours and would like comments on how other clubs plan to handle this situation.
Why not just download the rating list before the tournament? If nobody in your club has a notebook computer, a used one can be had for less than $100 on ebay that would be just fine for holding a ratings list or running pairing SW (which might cost more than the HW). If that doesn’t appeal to you, you can go to the TD/AFFILIATE area and get a list of rated players in your vicinity and then print it out. Enter a range of zip codes or a particluar state. Finally, there are the old fashioned ways – ask players to bring their latest CL and check the ratings from that (this works well if it’s mostly club members that play, but then you can just look up your clubs members ahead of time also), buy a printed copy for any month you need a supplement, etc. It used to be COMMON for most players at a tournament (especially the small ones) to have their CLs with them to prove membership and ratings.
It would be nice if the custom rating list page had the same search capability as the on-line TLA search – being able to find players within 150 miles, for example.
If you use a computer pairing program like SwissSys or WinTD you would simply update the data file by downloading the supplements. You don’t need internet access at the site.
If you don’t use a computer for pairing one can download the sup[lements in pdf format or text file. I just checked the Feb supplement and it came to 116 pages so that might be quite a printout.
Just before your tournament
You could get a custom list for just your state or maybe even certain zipcode areas and print those out.
If you know the vast majority of the players that would come to your tournament you could create a custom list of your own that could be updated directly from the MSA area. The problem here is if someone not on the list shows up. Here you might have to revert to the Dec Supplement or the players magazine label.
Yet another way you can check ratings – use your cell phone!
I think Mike posted this in the wrong thread, so I’m duplicating it here.
If you used that in combination with an updated printout of the most likely people to show up that would be almost perfect.
Someone asked the other day about whether MSA could generate a list of players from a club list. The best I could do on short order was to enable multiple IDs on the same line. (I’ve tried it with 25 IDs, more than that might work too.)
This has been an interesting thread, but wouldn’t it serve organizers and/or TDs better if it were in the Organizers and/or TD forum instead? 
Just shows how hard it is to stay on topic. 
I placed the initial question here because I felt it was more of an USCF issue. (Magazine staying in sync with your official rating etc) But after that question was basically answered followup questions took the thread in a different direction. So if the Moderators want to move this to another forum that is more than fine with me.