The USCF is offering a new service for players, we can now email you when an event you played in is rated, letting you know what your new rating is. (Those ratings are still unofficial and subject to change when the event is rerated, of course.)
These emails will go out shortly after the event is rated, most likely even before it gets posted to MSA.
To sign up for this service, and to make other changes to your email preferences profile, please go to:
I hope it says somewhere, conspicuously, that “this post-tournament rating is NOT your official rating for this month.” Otherwise some players may be waving an email in the TD’s face which “says my rating is ‘1795’ and NOT the ‘1805’ YOU say my rating is!”
While the disclaimer is accurate, I wonder if we should be more explicit. (Note that I have not yet seen the e-mail that is generated, so I’m guessing here.) I’d suggest something like this:
The disclaimer does explain that only ratings on the “rating list” are considered “official” but doesn’t explain why “official” ratings are important. I think the explanation in the e-mail would be particularly helpful avoiding confusion on the part of scholastic players (and, more importantly, their parents).
(For extra credit , we could check to see if the post-tournament rating is higher than the pre-tournament rating and perhaps start the e-mail body with “Congratulations!”.)
Since we run the next month’s rating list no later than the 7th of the month, if we’re going to print a published rating it should probably be for both the current month and the upcoming month, when the latter is available and different from the player’s current published rating.
We could also cite the rulebook regarding the use of official ratings, but that might wind up confusing people, because some TDs will use more current ratings than the official published rating for an event (not always properly) and some events, notably the USATE and some of the national scholastics, will use published ratings older than the current official ratings based on the starting date of the event.
, we could check to see if the post-tournament rating is higher than the pre-tournament rating and perhaps start the e-mail body with “Congratulations!”.)