I don’t really like the colors column as shown there. I think I’d like sometheing that looks like a standard crosstable:
John Doe…W12 B2 B17 W8
12345678 1600 ----> 1620…1…1…2…3
Maybe it’s my way of looking at information, but I’d rather see all the relevant information for each round in one column. I don’t want to look back to another colum to look at color and then line it up with the round. In a short tournament Mike’s format is okay, but for a 9 round tournament such as the World Open or the US Open it’s a pain to go back and forth across multiple columns. Since this is the way the pairing programs display the information it would seem like it would be easier to have the rating report display laid out in the same format.
I’m not a computer programmer so I don’t know what is easier. But having used pairing software since 1991, it just seems to make more sense to have the tournament crosstable and rating report crosstable look similar if color information is going to be added. Though it seems like adding color information to the rating report just gives the nitpickers something else to moan about. (WTF? Why did he get black in that round? Seems like he should have been white!)
Mike, on another note, how about adding the time control to the MSA header info displayed? I would find that both interesting and helpful, especially in trying to see what time controls are being used in other events around my area.
That’s a possibility, though we don’t currently transfer that data field over to the MSA database.
Some time this summer we’re going to do a complete rewrite on MSA, which may include an update of the database, that would be the best time to do this. I’ll probably open an MSA ‘suggestion box’ topic when I’m getting close to working on that.
If you guys are interested in the statistics stuff I wrote, I’ll be more than happy to give you the code for it. I no longer host it on our site, but it would be nice to still see that stuff up there.
I would love it if there was a way once you were in a player’s record to search for a specific opponent. Sometimes I’m curious as to what my lifetime record is versus people I play frequently, or I want to see how one of my students has done against certain people.
Our ISP is supposed to be upgrading the MySQL server to version 5 this month.
That is supposed to be a faster and more stable release, so it may give us the ability to allow more complex queries, such as someone’s lifetime record against another player. Right now a few complex or long queries can bring the database server to a grinding halt.
If that doesn’t work, our other plan is to co-locate some equipment at the ISP so that we can have a PostgreSQL server that we can administer.
What I figured out is to do a big query on all the player’s detail, then let the code go from there. I’m assuming that SQL Server is a bit faster, but I think if you can get a query on a person to return all the data within a couple of seconds, you could write the web code to do the math part.
I think I could return a player’s data with 400+ tournaments and the data in just over a second.
I can only use the database tools I have, which are MySQL at the ISP and Postgres at the USCF office.
Not knowing what database you were searching, I don’t know if my search times would be comparable. The USCF crosstable database has over 100,000 events, with over 3.3 million players.
Finding all the tournaments for a player isn’t that hard, though finding all of them for a very active player does take some time. Finding all the times that a player had a particular opponent is harder, because the crosstables use the pairing number, not the member’s ID, so it’s necessary to do a table join to find out who all the opponents were then sort out a particular USCF ID.
The important thing is that the information is there, in some format or other.
I was thinking that separating colors from results might be less confusing. (“Does this W stand for Win or White?”) That’s also why I suggested lowercase for the colors.
In addition, the viewer is often interested in color history, so he can figure out which color he thinks a player should have received in a given round. We have had some fruitful and educational discussions along the lines of “why did the computer make this or that pairing?” – just think what we could do if we could also see that a player’s color history was “wbwb” or whatever.
I don’t think separating the color history would make it less confusing. Players are used to seeing it in the same column on the top line because that’s how the wallcharts are formatted in the pairing programs. The old style wallcharts looked like that too. I do understand the confusion of W for win versus W for white. That’s a question that I get frequently from new parents and players, but I think once somebody has reached the sophistication level of checking the MSA for results they know how to read a wallchart correctly.
Though having all the color information in 1 column makes it easy to see the pattern. (wbwbb for example) But suppose I want to see why the last round was not w which would have been the expected color given the tendancy to alternate. I would have to go look at the 5th round column, find the opponent #, and then go back to that player’s color column, and look at his color sequence which may have been bwbbw. That would explain why the opponent got w in the last round. But I think for larger tournaments it’s easier to follow the reasoning round by round. Again this may be because I like to see things in neat columns. (Maybe that’s why I tend to miss long range bishops moves )
I think I’d prefer a single-line format, anyway. Something like this:
99 John Doe 12345678 NY 1600->1650 2.5 bwbw W12 L23 D34 W45
At present, each entry in the crosstable takes up THREE lines – two lines of information, and a row of hyphens separating each entry from the next. Reducing this to one would mean you could see more of the crosstable at a time, on a page or on the screen.
Of course, you could also do this while putting the colors with each result, rather than gathering them together in a “colors” column:
99 John Doe 12345678 NY 1600->1650 2.5 W12b L23w D34b W45w
– but I still prefer the first way.
I wish pairing programs would use a format like this, too (i.e. adding a “colors” column to the single-line, or “standings”, format). The viewability of wall charts would be greatly improved.
F, U, H, B can be displayed as FOR, UNPL, HBYE and BYE. I realize that there are more codes than simply win, lose or draw, but visually it’s much easier to digest + - =.
I never liked the cumulative scoring in wallcharts. Easy to make mistakes both reading (to figure out results) and writing (when calculating from results).
I think that’s too cryptic (and I’m a math person). I prefer the old standby W, D, L for results, and w, b for color (lowercase to distinguish color from result). The result and color can be combined in each column (as in “D23b”) but I still say a separate color column is even better, although I admit its advantages may diminish as the number of rounds increases.
But having used pairing software since 1991, it just seems to make more sense to have the tournament crosstable and rating report crosstable look similar if color information is going to be added. Though it seems like adding color information to the rating report just gives the nitpickers something else to moan about. (WTF? Why did he get black in that round? Seems like he should have been white!)
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