New Rating Report Online Data Entry Form

Running Chess Tournaments
1

The testing for the new data entry form for entering rating reports has reached a point where it would be helpful to have some other people experiment with the program while other aspects of the changes (such as the program to handle submitting events) are completed.

TDs willing to do some testing can do so by logging in to the TD/Affiliate Support Area and then entering the following URL:

secure2.uschess.org/TD_Affil/tnmt_edit_new.php

To get to the upload page, use:

secure2.uschess.org/TD_Affil/tnmt_entry_new.php

It is possible to run events through the new validation module. Validation is now done in real-time, though for really LARGE events that could still take several minutes.

It will not be possible to submit events for rating (quite yet), but that should be possible by early next week (hopefully Tuesday), so while it won’t be possible to submit events right now the events that TDs create with the new form COULD be submitted next week.

One feature that has been added since the last peek at the new form is that it now supports both the original (1991) DBF file format and the revised DBF file format that was posted (in draft form) in 2008. Recent versions of WinTD (probably 4.11 and later) are capable of creating this newer file format which includes, among other things, color information.

There are some fields in the draft standard that are not being supported at this time (like the FIDE Arbiter IDs) and there are some fields in both the original and draft format that are no longer needed (like the rating system field.)

A newer (probably XML-based) file format will be worked on in 2012. The authors of WinTD and SwisSys have already been advised and both appear to be willing to update their programs to accommodate that format when it is released.

At Bill Hall’s request, one of the features that has been added to the new data entry form is the ability to accommodate historical tournaments (eg, ones rated before December 8, 1991.) Basically, this involved disabling a number of checks, such as the membership expiration date, and including support for IDs that are not in current USCF records. Fields for entering the pre-tournament and post-tournament ratings were also included.

However, that feature is not activated yet. The USCF office may put out a call in early 2012 for volunteers to enter events from the distant past that can be added to USCF archival records.

2

For tournaments with multiple schedules, the new rating report form apparently requires you to list the time control for each round of each schedule (a bit onerous, but not insurmountable). But what’s really an unbelievably, tedious and completely, mind-bogglingly unnecessary new addition is that the rating report form asks "which schedule each player in the tournament entered (i.e., 3-Day or 2-Day schedule). For a section in which all the games are regularly-rated (or all Quick-rated, for that matter) it is completely unnecessary to identify which schedule, 3-Day or 2-Day, each player played! The only exception would be if a section is FIDE-rated, then it would be necessary to identify any games possibly played at non-FIDE-rateable time controls. This is a special case, an extremely tiny percentage of the games and even then does not appear to be necessary when the USCF Office already has this information from the TDs and sends it to FIDE anyway.

The way the form is set up, the TD would be required to keep a record of every single player, in each section, before the schedules merged. Then when you submit the rating report online, you would have to go down the entire online wallchart, and look to see, player by player, if he is in the 2-Day or the 3-Day schedule. And this would only work for the advance entries, for the on-site entries, you would have to check every entry, line by line, on the on-site entry sheets. This could easily take hours and hours and hours of work for a tournament which should take at most half an hour.

There is absolutely no mandate from anyone to provide the office with a research project on all the players in every tournament AND ESPECIALLY WITHOUT ANY ADVANCE NOTICE WHATSOVER FROM “THE OFFICE” (whatever that is). I can’t see that the Executive Board is going to stand having this shoved down the TDs throats; I certainly will not.

3

Side question (admittedly a little off-topic): Where will the color information appear in the MSA crosstables?

Bill Smythe

4

Having the round by round time control for all the schedules without knowing which schedule each player was in makes it impossible to use that information. We hope to be able to use it for things like deciding which games in a multi-schedule event are FIDE ratable and which are not, which may affect the computation of the FIDE ratings fee the USCF charges.

It seems likely that the majority of multi-schedule events are also FIDE rated, at least in the open section. However, FIDE may also decide that multi-schedule events are not FIDE ratable.

Once the pairing programs have a way to generate an upload file with the schedule assignment for each player (SwisSys maintains it post-merge, WinTD currently does not), that should take care of entering that information. Until then, most TDs will probably not take the time to enter it manually.

It would also be time-consuming to manually enter all the color information for a large event, though a few TDs have done it for their events, mostly small ones.

Not having the round by round or schedule by schedule time control information, including which player was in which schedule for multi-schedule events, does not currently affect the USCF ratability of events. (Assuming organizers are not running events which have quick-only time controls in some rounds/schedules.) So if TDs give us less than full information about time controls, that’s essentially the same as what they were doing in 2011.

When the additional information being collected (color, additional TD assignments, etc) will be displayed on MSA has not yet been discussed. The way color is shown in the crosstable area of the new form (the display-only format), as a small letter to the left of the cumulative score, is one way to show it, what do people think of that format?

5

If you are talking about MSA, at present the format is:

---------------------------------------------------------------------- 8 | BILL SMYTHE |2.5 |W 15|L 2|W 17|D 9| IL | 10339022 / R: 1818 ->1806 |N:4 | | | | | | Q: 1700 ->1700 | | | | | | ----------------------------------------------------------------------
I would suggest (for the time being at least) adding colors as follows:

---------------------------------------------------------------------- 8 | BILL SMYTHE |2.5 |W 15|L 2|W 17|D 9| IL | 10339022 / R: 1818 ->1806 |N:4 | b| w| w| b| | Q: 1700 ->1700 | | | | | | ----------------------------------------------------------------------
This would require no additional space, since it’s blank there right now anyway. And it would put all the colors in one line, uninterrupted by other data, so you could see the color sequence, in this case “bwwb”, clearly.

Bill Smythe

6

The monospaced character font based MSA format is archaic, the new data entry form uses a more web-centric format.

7

The monospaced MSA format is easy to imitate with HTML tables. And probably would look way better with HTML tables, too.

Out of curiosity, are the MSA tournament crosstables static documents, or are they generated afresh from stored data upon each viewing?

8

They are stored internally (for rating system purposes) in a database in a format originally designed many years ago (around 1990), though it was converted from a COBOL file to database tables in 2003 and has been modified a few times since then to include additional fields, like the time control information. The MSA tables are a subset of the internal tables, and were set up when MSA was written in 2002.

Crosstables are rendered on the fly.

9

Some directors use “toss” as a final round option. I use “toss” for filler or cross section games which I place in sections called “extra games”. Will directors now be required to note colors in cases like this?

10

‘Toss’ is a method for ASSIGNING color, not reporting it.

You could skip reporting the color for those games. What WinTD and SwisSys would have in their records for upload files is of some concern, but the online reporting form supports an ‘unknown’ option for color.

However, if a TD is reporting color information for a section, shouldn’t it be for all played games in that section?

At this time we are not requiring TDs supply color information, though we are making it POSSIBLE to report it, something that people have been requesting.

Color information has been needed for FIDE rated sections for several years.

11

In the new form, is there a cumulative score column for each round? If so, the above seems to be as good an idea as any.

On the MSA crosstables, however, there is only one cumulative score column, and a bunch of round-by-round columns. In that case, there is plenty of blank space in each round-by-round field for the color.

Hmm. That suggests an exciting (or at least interesting) new possible feature. I’m sure it’ll be about number 863 on your to-do list. When a crosstable is rendered, the user could be asked which of two (or more) formats he prefers. One could be the existing format (with colors added):

---------------------------------------------------------------------- 8 | BILL SMYTHE |2.5 |W 15|L 2|W 17|D 9| IL | 10339022 / R: 1818 ->1806 |N:4 | b| w| w| b| | Q: 1700 ->1700 | | | | | | ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Another could be a single-line format:

 8  Bill Smythe     10339022  IL  R:1818:1806  N:4  2.5   W15b L2w W17w D9b

Or (putting all the colors together):

 8  Bill Smythe     10339022  IL  R:1818:1806  N:4  bwwb  2.5   W15 L2 W17 D9

If you really want to get fancy, you could let the user choose to omit some columns (such as quick rating, norm, ID number, state), and/or choose column order (e.g. ID number before or after state), and/or go to a two-line format for quick ratings (so the quick ratings could be directly beneath the regular), etc etc etc.

If you really really want to get fancy, you could let the user store his format choices (in his forum cookie, maybe?) for easy re-use in the future.

The possibilities are endless – as are, I’m sure, the number of hours of work that could go into implementing them. :neutral_face:

Bill Smythe