perhaps the entire phrase in red?? Not sure if we are whistling in the dark, here, to simply no avail, for if one chooses not to read the disclaimer, then whatever is stated is moot. At least if it is in red, less
reading may be required, and once again, we can tiredly ask the protesting parent ’ and did you read the disclaimer highlighted in red??’
Rob Jones
Remember that supplying the tie-break order does NOT say which trophies people received. Many scholastic tournaments have sections with both overall trophies and grade level trophies. Unless the grade is also supplied there is nothing showing that Jane (8th on tie-breaks) took the trophy for best second grader while 3rd-grader John (7th on tie-breaks) did not get a trophy.
Personally I’d prefer a prize list upload to be available (WinTD can export the prize list to Excel, and SwissSys most likely can do the same - .html might also be possible and that would reduce the work the office has to do to make it MSA compatible hopefully to the point where it could be automated).
Such an upload could also include the team prizes as well.
Also, there are a number of tournaments I do where I am not USING tie-breaks (cash prizes). So for those tournaments being forced to show the tournament in tie-break order would detract from a clearer picture of what happened.
See my proposal, three posts above this one. The organizer could (optionally) supply the tiebreak points, but the crosstable would still be shown in “standard” order (score, then rating) until the viewer pressed the “use organizer-supplied rankings” button.
This method would avoid the problem of tiebreaks being used where they are not appropriate (or not desired by the viewer), while still giving the organizer the fullest possible control of the sort order, for those viewers who prefer to see it that way.
Bill Smythe
Even if tie-break points are shown (or sorted on within a score-group) they may not do (probably won’t do?) what their proponents want them to do. Because trophies are often for groupings/grades that are not otherwise in MSA the tie-break presentation won’t show which players are skipped over for trophies because they are not in a group that would get them. Rather than have a brand new discussion start up over how showing the results in score/tie-break order is still incomplete, I added a comment that dredges up an old idea of having the actual prize list be accessible from MSA.
Here is an example of a tournament where tie-break points won’t state which trophies anybody won.
uschess.org/assets/msa_jooml … 1402237512
IMHO, Mr. Wiewel’s most recent example is yet another practical demonstration of why, unless USCF forces a standardized and complete set of tiebreaks in all USCF rated events, trying to report this information in MSA is a well-intentioned but utterly doomed use of precious time and resources.
(Lest the above be misread, I do not advocate USCF going anywhere near such a mandate. Also, please note that the suggested tiebreak order in the rulebook is not at all complete.)
If we want actual prizes/tiebreaks to be reflected in MSA, give the organizer/TD an option to upload a .txt export of the prize report, along with the TD/A export files, with whatever detailed results are desired to be shown. Also, a field could be added to TD/A where the organizer/TD can put in a hyperlink to an external site which has whatever detailed results are desired to be shown.
Note that “just adding a field”, and similar cavalierly phrased expressions for adding functionality to an existing platform, likely underestimate the amount of design, development and testing required for proper implementation.
As you point out, sorting by tiebreaks will not always make it possible to see easily why Jane won this prize and John won that one. It could, however, make it possible for the organizer to list each score group in the order he wants.
If it is desired to show prizes (including age and grade trophies, etc), still another optional field could be added for prizes.
But, please, let’s make all this stuff optional – for both the organizer and the viewer. The default view should continue to be by score, then rating. Only if the viewer elects to view the organizer sort, should any of this other stuff appear. If we let the organizer ram the sort order down the throat of the viewer, all hall will break loose.
The organizer wouldn’t even need to use any “standard” tiebreak system. If the organizer has determined that Jane wins 1st under-1800 trophy, and John wins 2nd under-1800 trophy, all he need do is give Jane 99 tiebreak points and John 98.
Bill Smythe
I agree completely.
What I am proposing, though, is to simply allow the organizer to supply the tiebreak points, using whatever tiebreak system he wishes – even a made-up one. And even then, the organizer sort would determine the listing order only when the viewer chooses to view it that way.
I am strongly opposed (even more than you are, if that’s possible) to having the MSA software actually calculate tiebreaks. This would be a horrible idea, for a whole bunch of reasons. For one, there would be no way to decide which tiebreak system(s) the organizer actually used. For another, there may be small nuances of variations in the way tiebreaks are calculated in marginal situations, such as cross-section pairings. For a third, most viewers probably prefer score-then-rating, most of the time. For a fourth – well, I guess three is enough.
I am proposing only the addition of two new, optional, fields – tiebreak points (whatever system the organizer chooses) and prizes won (suggested by jwiewel). This could be done at the time of validation, via the simple device of the organizer simply populating the extra fields manually using the USCF data entry screens. No need to modify WinTD or SwisSys, at least not initially (such features could be added later).
It would not be a trivial task, even in the simplified version I’m proposing. And it probably won’t bubble up to the top of anybody’s to-do list any time soon. It’s a decent idea to keep in mind down the road, though.
Bill Smythe
Pretty much every scholastic tournament I’ve done has gone to the second tie-break for some trophies, a majority go to the third tie-break, some go to the fourth tie-break, and occasionally I’ve had to go further than that for some of the trophies. Manually overriding the tie-breaks for every player (to get them into a specific sequence) would be a pain.
Forty individual trophies is normal for a lot of scholastic tournaments and I’ve done some with as many as 145 individual trophies:
uschess.org/assets/msa_jooml … 0502057271
uschess.org/assets/msa_jooml … 0602044971
Manually entering that many trophies is likely to be ignored by a lot of TDs as either way too much work or as way too much of a time delay before rating an event (even if you overlook the possibility of data entry errors). Some TDs have had players/parents complain that the tournament is not yet rated by the time the players get home (that includes having parents of players in the quickly finishing sections sending in such complaints while the slower sections of the day are still going on).
WinTD (and probably SwissSys) already has the capability of generating a prize list that can be copied and pasted into Excel or Word. I’ve never used it, but WinTD also has export to .html capabilities.
You forgot to quote the following comment of Boyd’s if you are saying he advocates a jack-booted approach.
“(Lest the above be misread, I do not advocate USCF going anywhere near such a mandate. Also, please note that the suggested tiebreak order in the rulebook is not at all complete.)”
I’d like to thank Mr. Wiewel for the whole of his last post, for two reasons.
(1) I can rest assured that my current filters are well and truly justified.
(2) I enjoy the irony of reading a post that first demonstrates the dangers of aliteracy, then immediately pivots to complaining about people exhibiting aliteracy.
Define “ramming” please - since I’m not sure how this relates to what I’ve said?
I think I’ve posted something similar previously - since TMS can also actually calculate prizes, that, theoretically, could also be optionally collected by MSA and reported to players.
The point here that I am advocating is to realize that the concept of MSA is powerful and is a great service offered by USCF, one that makes USCF attractive, and that if we continue to expand it also saves organizers time and effort - especially with respect to scholastic events since they no longer have to post results themselves online. That has - and adds - value for organizers and for players.
This goes back to the concept that USCF’s key value is in offering an infrastructure. Making MSA more powerful adds to a host of additional possibilities.
I don’t see how reporting to players what they would naturally expect to see is a doomed use of resources. It might not be the highest urgency of resources, but it would appear to be an important use, and once where planning could be used to incorporate the change more easily.
For example, what’s wrong with a mandate regarding TB use? Don’t we mandate - or at least prioritize many other rules? Or how about offering a USCF seal of approval for TMS and one of the required features would be is that if TBs or Prize calcs are used - they are automatically included in the Tournament (not just Rating) Report?
It often seems to me like USCF members are “afeared” of setting up requirements. It’s like “Oooooo---- we don’t want to MAKE people do things in a certain way.” Well why not? Why are we so afraid of this? It would often reduce cost, simplify life and/or increase value. Wow, there’s an argument for not setting standards if I ever heard one.
Because no matter what you do, how you post, people still have to have the ability to read, which many are not using. For those who have eyes to see, there is no issue worth dealing with. For those who refuse to see, there will always be issues. And for them, additional resources are simply wasted. Further, the more detailed we make this website to satisfy the multitudes, the greater confusion they will have due to the variety of tiebreaks used, and tournament types run.
Again, folks not choosing to see the color red, and reading what is clearly stated is their personal issue, and not one worth further consideration by USCF.
Rob Jones
“Ramming something down somebody’s throat” simply means forcing somebody to accept something they don’t want to accept.
Suppose Jane prefers to view crosstables in order by score and rating. In that case, presenting the crosstable to Jane in any other order (such as the tiebreak order chosen by the organizer) would be ramming the crosstable presentation down Jane’s throat.
Whether this relates to what you’ve said depends on exactly what you’ve said and what you meant when you’ve said it.
If you meant that the person viewing the crosstable (not the organizer who posted it) should have the option of viewing it either by score/rating or in the manner preferred by the organizer, then you and I agree.
I, for one, normally prefer score/rating order. For one thing, it’s easier to figure out what next round’s pairings might have been, so that I can start lively conversations like “Which pairings are correct?” which tend to be interesting and informative for at least the first 50 posts or so. 
If the MSA crosstable order were to be changed to always (and automatically) reflect the way the organizer ordered the players for prize purposes, then, for me, that would not be an improvement. It would be a worsening, as it would take away something I presently have.
I assume TMS means tournament management software, like WinTD or SwisSys.
Yes, if these software packages can be upgraded to report tiebreaks and prizes, and if the MSA software can be upgraded to accept this new information, then I’m all in favor – with the proviso mentioned earlier, that the viewer would still have the option to view the crosstable in simple score/rating order.
I am opposed, however, to having MSA directly calculate tiebreaks. There would be too much danger of a discrepancy between the MSA calculation and the organizer’s (or the TMS’s) calculation. Such a discrepancy would likely destroy the entire purpose of allowing the organizer to specify the sort order. Instead, the organizer (or TMS) should simply present the tiebreak points to MSA, player by player, and MSA should accept what it finds there.
You and I largely agree, I think. But I may have thought it through in a little more detail than you have. I am known (at least to myself) as a detail person.
That depends how it’s done. Again, the devil is in the details. Using tiebreaks as supplied by the organizer should work well. Conversely, it would likely be a disaster for MSA to figure out its own tiebreaks, which may or may not agree with the organizer’s.
On this point, Kevin, you and I will have to continue to disagree. First of all, if it’s done the way I suggested above, no mandate would be necessary. Second, different tournaments vary widely in all kinds of unpredictable ways, making it impossible to come up with a single “preferable” method of breaking ties. Forced standardization in this area should not be necessary.
Bill Smythe
Baloney, for Jane does not have the right to demand anything. She is a user, not an organizer or a doer. Right now, the problem is more of we don’t have enough drivers for the bus, than we have drivers. As i have stated many times, many places–it is not my job as an organizer to fill the whimsical ideas of others in my tournaments. Either they like or don’t and announce such with either their attendance or not. i have absolutely no desire to be all to everyone.
Rob Jones
The way I look at it, MSA should serve the players, not just the organizers. In fact, organizers would be well advised to remember that they, too, serve the players.
Bill Smythe
From a utility standpoint, I completely concur with the above.
One of the aspects of system design that is often overlooked, though, is how to classify users. In the case of MSA and TD/A, there really are three classes of users. For the purposes of this post, they will be loosely defined as administrators, directors, and players.
All of the proposed changes to these systems could, and probably will, affect all three classes. The administrators will have to program the changes. The directors may, and probably will, be responsible for uploading information to comply with the changes. The players may, and probably will, be impacted by the formatting changes wrought by the system design.
Ideally, the changes would make the system more informative for the players, would not make it harder to use for the directors, and would require minimal programming for the administrators. Of course, this is not an ideal world. So, this is where the previously referenced cost-benefit analysis comes into play.
many of the proposed changes would likely require a new XML standard to be written by the administrators, and then implemented by the developers of WinTD and SwissSys, as well as any other pairing programs that may wish to be widely used in USCF play. After these standards are implemented, which is far from a trivial task, the directors would have to input some new fields in their rating reports, potentially dozens of new fields depending on how the system design changes are implemented. Many of these fields may end up being manual entry as well, which would probably serve to annoy this user class and greatly increase the odds of user error.
In theory, the players would receive greater information about the results, and more specifically, prizes awarded at the tournament. In practice, I respectfully submit it has been demonstrated ad nauseam in this and other threads that the information is not likely to be accurate unless it is directly supplied in full by the director.
This is why I think any solution that requires either a new XML standard or significant data entry into TD/A is a waste of time. I have yet to see any solution where the director user class is not the ultimate, final source of information for any event. Therefore, it seems eminently logical to provide the director a simple solution for giving as much information as he chooses about the final prizes in his event. Any solution where MSA computes anything that may be inaccurate is folly, IMHO.
(Numbering and punctuation added by me.)
Yes, this is one of those “choose any two” situations. The horns of a trilemma.
If the chosen solution fails for either the players or the directors (counts 1 and 2), there will be hall to pay for years to come.
If, by contrast, the chosen solution is weak on count 3 – i.e. if it requires significant effort by the administrators – then at least the effort, once made, will be beneficial indefinitely. It will be a one-time effort (though that “time” may be 3-6 months).
The tiebreak fields could come from the tournament management software in an automated fashion, and would not need to be entered manually. Prize fields, to be sure, would require manual entry, especially if both prize description and dollar amount were to be included (e.g. “2nd under-1800 $200”). But some organizers might want this information included and thus should be willing to make the extra effort.
Agreed. MSA should make absolutely no attempt to calculate prizes. The director would need to furnish the prize list if he wants it included.
The same goes for tiebreaks. If the director is using the tiebreaks furnished by his pairing program (SwisSys or WinTD) to determine final ranking and/or trophies, then (and only then) should he direct the pairing program to submit its tiebreak information as part of the tournament report. If the director has used other tiebreak methods, or if he has computed the tiebreaks himself, then he should be required to enter tiebreak information by hand, if he wants it to be displayed on the report and/or to be used to determine the players’ ranking order.
Agreed. This is why the details must be thought out thoroughly. Any “plan” that does not include sufficient detail is likely to work out poorly in practice.
Bill Smythe
Don’t all changes to social contracts run the risk of this all the time? That doesn’t make the change bad. There is something to be said, for example, for simplicity versus making everyone happy all the time- which requires essentially infinite choice. Certainly Bill, I could find examples of your support of rules changes that could be viewed as “ramming something down someone’s throat.” Lets not always be so overly concerned about unproductive opinions.
And the same could be said if Jane preferred for Rooks to move like Bishops- requiring them to move like Rooks would be ramming something down Jane’s throat. Since we can change the terms of the argument and see that the argument is not generally compelling, we can see that the FORM of the argument is not compelling, and hence it is compelling based upon thecan see that the terms of the argument. Consequently, Bill, we can dismiss the generalized argument you offer, since it is clearly term-specific.
And in fact, this is what happens now- people who would like to view the most natural tournament result order are forced not to on MSA -we are in fact ramming a tournament-irrelevant order down their proverbial throat.
All that said, Bill, I have always argued for providing the Viewer some choice with respect to this topic. There are some good reasons to allow multiple sorts. But the argument you provide isn’t one of the good reasons- its just nota valid argument.
[/quote]
We ALREADY HAVE forced standardization, of tiebreaks Bill-the question is only whether they can be even more standardized.
I don’t get how any TD can argue against the concept of rules?
This is why I shouldn’t make posts on topics like this too quickly. There is a fourth class of users - developers - that I implicitly folded into “administrators”, but they’re really discrete. Their role in any such proposal would be significant.
Any programmatic solution will require, at a minimum, 4-6 months’ work from administrator and developer class users. Some of that work will be in parallel; some of it cannot be. If the developers object to the new standard, there’s a problem. So, the standard would have to have a clear and significant benefit, while still not leading to overwhelming amounts of work for the developer class. (It’s worth noting here that the sole developers of the two most widely used USCF pairing programs don’t work on those programs full-time.)
There are additional issues here. The primary one that leaps to mind is security. I’ll discuss this briefly in the next two paragraphs.
Currently, if a result shown in MSA needs to be changed, an email to the national office from the organizer with sufficient event and change detail is enough. This doesn’t require changing any prize or tiebreak information. If the above (or some derivative) is implemented, then either (a) the national office would have to go through and make potentially hundreds of changes to a single rating report, or (b) the director would have to go through and make potentially hundreds of changes to a single rating report.
The problem with (a) is that we don’t have a bevy of people sitting on their thumbs in Crossville, waiting for assignments. The problem with (b) is that its adoption would require scrapping a significant security feature of the current TD/A-MSA setup - the inability of anyone other than an approved designate at the national office to change submitted results in the ratings server. I imagine the administrator class would object to (a), especially the first time they have to change information in some 600-player section. I imagine almost everyone - or, at least, those who think about data security - would object to (b).
However, if a director simply had to forward an updated prize list by email to the national office, that would just involve an administrator logging into the back end of the system, uploading the new file, (probably) deleting the old file, and then testing to make sure the new info is linked to the correct crosstable(s). Developing all this functionality, of course, is definitely non-trivial, but if it doesn’t require much upkeep by the national office, it loses long-term cost, which causes its long-term profit to increase accordingly.
IMHO, this has some potential, since the recurring workload shifts away from MSA.
Of course, I still think it would be less work for three of the four defined user classes (all except players) if the organizer can simply provide a separate prize/tiebreak report (probably in .txt/.pdf format). Affected directors typically have to produce this info anyway for awards ceremonies or post-event prize distribution; it would be trivial to save a copy in a predefined format and upload it along with the TD/A submission. No extra work for developers, minimal extra work for administrators (adding a field to TD/A; adding storage/fields in MSA; linking to uploaded file in event report). TD/A would have to allow for one upload per submitted section.
This assumes that the plan is worth the effort. I maintain my oft-expressed skepticism on that assumption, for reasons previously elucidated over the last 18-20 months on the Forums. However, one of the things I often see in my job is that for some reason, people never have time to do tech projects right…but they always have time to do them over. 
I never quite grasped that.
So yes, let’s measure twice, thrice, 20 times if need be, before making a cut.