A few times I have gotten the question of “If I play in the tournament will my new rating be official for next month’s rating list.” Until now the tournament was always late enough in the month for me to quickly say no chance. Is there an date in the month that I can confidently use? Next month my tournament is on 4th and I think that will make the September list which means the person will not play in my tournament. A plus score will likely be push him into the next section of the state championship.
For the past several years, the cutoff for a ratings list has been that the event must be submitted in time to make the last rating cycle of the day on the 1st Friday of the month. That ratings list becomes official on the first day of the following month.
In August, the first Friday will be the 3rd and that will be the cutoff for the September rating list.
The last rating cycle is at around 11:45 PM central time, but TDs who want to make sure an event makes the September list should not wait until 11:40 to try to submit it, because things can go wrong (the attempt to charge the ratings fee could fail, etc.), and ones who want to make sure their event misses the September list should probably wait until Saturday to submit it.
It would be a thrilling idea, however, to revert back to the idea in the submittal of ratings
reports to the use of current ratings. The error messages "strong performance-,
“weak performance”, even, “distance traveled” truly make little sense, esp with new
players who play several dozen games a month, for the “published” rating truly has,
very often, little basis in reality.
Rob Jones
Great!
Thank you for the info.
He can play on the 4th without a chance of bumping up his rating.
The ‘strong performance/weak performance’ odd-man-out check does use current ratings. (We have tried it both ways, the number of unusually strong or weak performances flagged does not change much, you get a slightly different set of false positives when you use everyone’s published rating rather than everyone’s current pre-event rating.)
However, we show published ratings on the data entry form because current published ratings is what the rules specify as the default for an event, so that’s the rating that TDs who follow the recommended procedures for their events should be using for pairing, too.
BTW, somewhere around 10% of the possible ID error warnings result in the TD changing either the ID or a result.
You could always include a phrase like “June rating supplement will be used for all prize and pairing purposes” in your TLA.
I assume you’re running a multi-section event with ratings cutoffs (rather than a one-section event with an upper rating limit). Shame on that player for not wanting to play in a section where he is not underrated. I wouldn’t miss him much, if I were you.
Bill Smythe
If an event is using a rating supplement other than the current official list as of the start of the event, such a phrase is mandatory in the TLA. Otherwise, it is redundant.
Those are warnings to alert the TD for situations that might indicate an erroneous ID was entered. You can easily enough ignore them.
You can’t IGNORE possible ID error warnings, you can OVERRIDE them.
For a fairly comprehensive guide to the errors, warnings and alerts that are generated when validating an event and what to do about them, see
If you override them without even considering what they are or mean, then one is ignoring them.
I think that is a dumb thing to do, by the way.
OUCH!! Got me there!!
Thank you for this, for I was kind of confused.
Rob Jones
You are very correct here.
Rob Jones
At the EB meeting following the Delegates Meeting, the EB voted to change the ratings cutoff date and remove OTB ratings from Chess Life mailing labels (since they would not longer be the player’s current rating.)
Starting with the November list, the cutoff will be the 3rd Friday in the month rather than the first Friday in the month.
I like the idea of a later cutoff date, but given how long it usually takes now before the monthly rating supplements are available for download, when can we expect them to be available under the new schedule?
Having the rating on the label was extremely useful in the days before electronic golden supplements (could save having to look through as many as a dozen different supplements for players active after a long lapse).
Now it is no longer necessary for the great majority of TDs, and a player can still do a print of the MSA page for the remaining few TDs that would find it useful.
Phil Smith is aware of the policy change. He will have to start working on ratings files as soon as the supplement job completes. (There’s likely to be a new ratings supplement file format in the next few months too, so that we have a file that includes Blitz ratings.)
There was an intentional delay of a week or so in the past so that we had time for any problems with the latest ratings list to surface. There haven’t been many such problems lately, so that pause is probably unnecessary.
The Top 100 lists are going to be even more of a challenge, because we have to validate any changes (for example, changes in birthdates) or players who make the list for the first time, and that usually takes a couple of weeks to contact the players or their parents and make sure we have the right birthdate and sex.
Now I have come to look at all of these error messages, for often they save my hide.
Rob Jones