Several people have asked for a status update on the new ratings system, and this is as good a time as any to write one, because the USCF systems are entering their daily maintenance period.
Those of you who don’t like seeing sausage made can skip the rest of this note. 
I started out on Friday morning with 251 events that appeared to be ready to rate. I had to place a few of these on hold, so I’m down to 239. (Some were matches or round robin events that we aren’t ready to rate yet, others had some potential ratings issues such as combined ratings for duplicate IDs that I wasn’t sure had been resolved, so I wasn’t sure if they were ready to rate.)
Of those events, 67 are reports received by the USCF office and the rest are ones entered online. That’s mostly a function of time, the online events have been queuing up for over a month, since we haven’t rated any events that ended in 2005 yet, while the ratings staff has only been processing events mailed to the office for about two weeks and is still picking up speed at it.
I’ll see if I can get Nancy to come up with an estimate of the number of rating reports they have piled up on people’s desks waiting to be processed.
When we start to train a mostly new office staff on rating reports, it’ll take them some time to build up speed as well, but I think the NY staff will be handling most ratings reports until some time in March.
I’m to the point where I’m pretty satisfied that the 239 events I have been testing are being rated properly, though I’m still checking them for a few issues.
Next up is writing out the post-event ratings to the new ratings table.
Once that works, basically they’re rated. I still hope to be at that point before I quit for the night.
Then I have to change how we update the ratings information on MSA, since that will be coming from the new ratings system. That will probably take me most of Monday to get working.
Dual rated events will probably not show up properly on MSA at first, since it appears that while the MSA database tables have space for both ratings, it can only display one of them at a time. That probably means that the quick portion of dual-rated events won’t show up on the crosstables on MSA right away though updated quick ratings from dual-rated events should be part of the ratings information shown on the member screen.
Tuesday I have to head to Tennessee to help get the new USCF office set up. Until we have Internet access working there, I won’t be able to do any work on the ratings system, and probably won’t even have e-mail or web access.
I don’t know if I’ll be ready to turn on the batch job for ratings before I leave for TN, so that probably means there won’t be any more events rated after this first batch until later this week, hopefully around Friday, assuming I have net access again by then. By then I would expect most of the ones on hold (other than matches and RR events) to be released and the NY ratings staff should have a number of other events ready to rate by then, too.
Printed crosstables for newly-rated events probably won’t be available for another week, possibly longer. We may have the ability to e-mail crosstables before we can send out printed ones.
A word of caution on the newly-rated events.
Because we are changing from a weekly cycle to a much more frequent cycle (probably several times an hour), many more events will be rated out of chronological order than before. The new system will try to find the most recent previous rating for each player, which most of the time will be from the most recently rated event for that player based on the event ending date, not the most recently rated event based on the rating batch date as in the old ratings system.
What this means is that if you played in 2 events, one on Friday and one on Sunday, and the Sunday event is rated first, when the Friday event is rated it will initially have the same pre-event rating as was used for the Sunday event.
The Sunday event will need to be re-rated to use the updated pre-event rating, ie, the post-event rating from the Friday event.
Events rated out of order have always been a problem, it’s just a much bigger one now because of the change in how frequently we rate events.
Alternate ways of dealing with out-of-sequence events, such as continuing to rate only once a week, leaving events in non-chronological order or holding more recent events for a few days in the hopes that earlier events will catch up with them all strike me as steps backwards, not forward.
Bulk re-rates of events to put recently rated events into true chronological order will probably begin in about two weeks. I know some people will be surprised when their rating changes even though they haven’t played recently, but keep in mind that with true chronological ordering the ratings you eventually see are what they SHOULD HAVE BEEN all along, if every event could be rated as soon as it ends.
I don’t know yet how far back we will be able to re-rate events, probably not as far back as anyone would like because of data problems. Re-rating is fairly fast (about 1/2 hour per month in tests), so if we can fix some of those data problems we can eventually re-rate further back, though eventually there will be a point beyond which we cannot go. Right now I’m thinking that point might be around September 1st, 2004, though I was hoping to be able to go back further than that.
Events from more than a few months ago that are submitted or rated late will probably not get re-rated. For inactive players, that may not make much difference, for really active ones the games since that event may have already factored out any gains or losses from a late-rated event anyway.
In one test case that I followed, an event held in June but just now being rated, one player gained 20 points from that event. However, he lost a lot of points in his next event, and when I track his updated rating through a few subsequent events it looks like he has given back 10 of those 20 points. The actual gain when all is said and done may be more or less than that, based on what his opponents in those events did over those months too.
I expect to have the first bulk re-rate done in time to resequence events for the April supplement, which I expect will be created on schedule in early March.
USCF’s long standing policy on rating supplements is that they cut off with events that ended the month before the supplement is created. In other words, the April supplement would not normally include any events that ended after February 28th.
I don’t see a need to change that policy, though with online submission I expect that more late February events will be able to make the April ratings supplement than in years past. I expect that the delay in processing events, which has been running 3 weeks or longer for most of the last year, will be whittled down by a combination of the improved programming and the switch to online submission by TDs.
A reasonable goal would be to have events received in the mail processed and rated within a week of when they arrive at the office. Of course, events submitted online will be rated within minutes of when the TD submits them. (TDs who have used the online system have already found out that it can take them a while to get all the errors and warnings resolved, they’re learning what the office has had to do to get their events rated all along!)
(As always, writing notes like this helped me work out a few issues.)
Lots of luck dealing with this!