I am the TD for a tournament this weekend. A player has preregistered and says he played about 30 years ago. He sent his membership money to the USCF who could not find his old USCF id or rating. His name is: Tom Cieszinski. The USCF has issued him a brand new USCF id: 13077511.
I looked in the Dec Chess Life 1976 and found the following:
Thomas Cieszinski, NM, 1239/22, 10426677.
I sent him an e-mail and he confirms that he played in New Mexico around 1972. (The tournament this weekend is in Minnesota -MN).
I could not find information on him from Chess Life magazines after 1976.
How do I handle this player?
Ignore his old information and treat him as “New”.
Use his old information 1239/22?
Use his old USCF id?
Allow him to play in the U1700 section.
Make him play in the Open section.
What prizes should he be eligible for?
Should I contact someone at USCF?
Hypothetical question: What if I had found his old rating to be 2100?
Note, I plan on submitting this tournament on-line.
Tom, here’s how I’d do it. (BTW, this is covered in the TD/A FAQ.)
Use the OLD ID when entering information into your computer so that it is the ID used for the rating report files. Assuming you’re sure you’ve got the right player, I’d go ahead and treat him as you would any other rated player.
When you upload the event, this will create an ‘invalid USCF ID’ error, because that ID isn’t on the USCF computers.
Submit a membership exception report using the ‘other’ checkbox. Give the information on his new and old USCF ID plus the old rating that you found. (That may not be his most recently published rating.)
The office will have to restore the old ID, transfer the membership from the new ID to the old ID and restore the old rating. This will probably take a couple of working days once you submit the exception report.
When the office has corrected the duplicate and restored the old ID, they should send you an e-mail about it.
I can’t tell from here if when he sent in his membership whether it was clear that he indicated he was a former member and from when. Thus I can’t say for sure whether the office tried to look up his old ID and just didn’t find it or whether there wasn’t an attempt made to look it up at all.
Eventually we may have a separate form for reporting duplicate IDs, though in my experience only about 90% of the duplicates reported by members or TDs turn out to really be duplicates. The others are players with similar names. (We have over 130 people named Michael Smith in the database, for example.)
Thus even if we give TDs (and possibly members) a form specifically for reporting duplicate IDs, the final decision on what to do to about it will still have to be made by the membership department.
I’m quite certain that I’ve got the right player, as he voluntarily offered to me that he had previously played in the New Mexico area around 1972. I had not previously told him that I had that information, but is confirmed by what I found in the old Chess Life. In addition, there aren’t any other “Tom Cieszinski” names in the ratings lists except this one!
Tom Cieszinski gave the USCF office the information about when he had previously played, but he did not have his “old” USCF ID to give them. He was in contact with the USCF by phone just days before the tournament (I think he was under the mistaken impression that he needed to be a member BEFORE he could enter the tournament.) He even suggested in an e-mail to me that it would be ok if I “prevented him from playing this tournament”(!!)
Anyway, on Tuesday evening I submitted an exception request, and I am still waiting to hear from the USCF before I can submit this tournament to be rated.
I know I read someplace that said it might take “several days” to manually process these types of requests, but I’m wondering if you know how long it typically is taking these days? (It’s been 3 full days so far, and it’ll probably miss the ratings run next week.)
Although it isn’t stated anywhere that I could see, I’m assuming that the USCF will (re-)issue him a membership card with his “old” USCF number. I don’t know if they can put the brakes on issuing him the “new” id that was given to him a week ago.
Delays in processing exception requests are probably a result of two issues.
Right now there are only two people trained in how to deal with them, including me. Once the new ratings/membership department staff is in place and trained a few weeks from now that number should increase, as our goal is for all of the ‘membership specialists’ to be able to handle most common membership and rating report issues.
The staff in New Windsor are also working to get records ready to be shipped to TN.
BTW, you’ll have to unlearn the concept of a weekly ratings batch, the new ratings system will run batches much more frequently than that, possibly as frequently as every 15-20 minutes. So, if you miss a batch, it’s like a NY subway train, there’s another one coming along in a few minutes.
It was 9 days ago that I submitted the exception processing for 1 player, Tom Cieszinski, from a tournament with over 100 players. I have still not been notified by the USCF that the exception has been processed.
I now see that Tom Cieszinski has both his “new” USCF ID and his “old” duplicate ID at the MSA site, with the old one marked as “inactive”.
If I had known that it was going to take 9 days (and counting) to try to “fix up” Tom Cieszinski with his 30 year old provisional rating, I think I would have opted to just closed my eyes and pretended that I had not seen his name in the 1976 Dec Chess Life.
It would be nice if there was some way to know approximately how much longer it will be before this might be resolved. You might want to think about putting in periodic (say once a week) replies to TDs who have filed exceptions to let them know that the USCF has not forgotten about the request and that it is in the queue to be worked on.
As I grow older, I guess I’m just getting a bit more impatient, especially when we are on the threshold of “instantaneously” having events rated.
I don’t know if Nancy has had someone look up his rating yet. I was hoping to have time to go over a few exception report issues with her today, including that one, but we ran out of time. I reactivated the old ID the other day as I needed to test that part of the code, but I don’t have access to the ratings history to verify that you located his most recent published rating.
Right now there are only two of us who have access to review exception reports, Nancy and me, and we’re both working on trying to get everything ready for the 1st live rate run. I have a few more data issues to check on tonight, then I can start testing the event processing code. (The mathematics portion of the code is finished, but that’s less than half of the code in that program, and there are several other programs that have to work properly in order to rate events.)
I think once we get the new staff in Crossville trained on handling exception reports you’ll see much faster response on them. (That training starts next week.)
Once we get more people trained to deal with them, that would be a good time to put in a tickler process for exception reports.
We already have a few other tickler processes running, including two that will send e-mail to TDs. We send a reminder twice a month about memberships that were entered online with payment by check if the payment hasn’t cleared yet and we send a weekly reminder about rating reports that have been entered online by the TD but haven’t been submitted for rating yet.
“Squeak! Squeak!”
(Someone once told me that the squeaky wheel gets the grease.)
Yet another week has gone by with no update.
From one of the first messages:
The office will have to restore the old ID, transfer the membership from the new ID to the old ID and restore the old rating. This will probably take a couple of working days once you submit the exception report.
The tournament was submitted 16 days ago.
Our annual state membership meeting is tomorrow evening on the eve of one of our traditional largest events of the year (about 200 players). I think it would be best for everyone if I could get this event rated sooner rather than later.
Until we have the new offices in TN connected to the USCF systems in NY, I don’t have access to make the changes needed before doing the next rate.
We don’t even have phones in the new offices yet, they MAY have the phone and net connections hooked up tomorrow, at which point I can start working on getting the secure connection to NY set up, but I need someone in NY to make the configuration changes to enable things on that end, and I’m not sure when we can arrange to have someone there or how long it will take to get it working.
Judy Misner did send me an e-mail on Friday (after I had first responded to a “weekly” mailing from the USCF for not having the Winter Open rated yet) explaining much as Mike has about the few resources at USCF to handle these exception cases.
On a related note, this past weekend Tom Cieszinski played in another Minnesota tournament, the Minnesota Open 2005, with about 200 other players. I was not the TD for the event, but I did inform the TDs (Dave Kuhns and Dan Voje) about the Cieszinski dual USCF membership problem. In talking to Dan, I don’t think he has submitted any crosstables for rating using TD/A, and I’m pretty sure Dave has not.
And I did have one player this past weekend ask me, “When is the Winter Open going to get rated?”, almost implying that it was the TDs fault. I guess I was too quick in getting a tournament rated in December using TD/A.
Actually, submitting an event via TD/A did NOT slow down when your event was (or in your case will be) rated, if anything it speeded it up.
No events held in 2005 or received after 12/31/04 were rated in the last run on the old ratings system in January. Of the 252 events rated on Feb 14th under the new ratings system, 69 of them were submitted by mail, the rest were submitted online.
Events with membership or ID issues would have been held up under either rating system.
The NY office is closed today, but I will be working with them on Tuesday to help clean up a number of events so that they’re ready to go in the next rate batch, which I hope to be ready to run on Wednesday. Hopefully that will include your event.
I guess I wasn’t clear in my previous message. I do realize that using TD/A does speed up the process, even for this Winter Open tournament that has been delayed 3 weeks now.
What I was trying to say was that in December I used TD/A and it worked TOO WELL(!) and a tournament was USCF rated within 2 weeks! The player in the January tournament therefore expected the January tournament to already be rated by now!!
I’ve not heard from the USCF yet about the exception that I submitted for the Winter Open 2005 tournament.
Is the following the order that things will occur?
I get notified from the USCF of the clarification to the player exception (Tom Cieszinski).
I re-submit the tournament.
The Winter Open tournament gets picked up in a rating run.
Also, while I was searching “Tournaments Received” at the USCF MSA, I stumbled across the following which I’m pretty sure is a mistaken “state”:
New Year’s Open | Indianapolis, MN | 2005-01-08 | 2005-01-14 |
A6018794 | 10278074
I think that should be “IN”, as in Indiana, not “MN” as in Minnesota.
I see that Dave Kuhns (or Dan Voje) has submitted the 2005 Minnesota Open and it has already been rated. This tournament included a player by the name:
Tom Cieszinski
This is the same player that has been holding up the tournament that I directed on Jan 29-30.
I have not been notified by USCF that the exception was handled for Tom Cieszinski.
Should I just try to re-submit the tournament again?
Submitting it again should not be necessary and would likely not only take more of your time but could even cause the event to be rated more than once, which is arguably worse than not having it rated at all.
I can have Nancy check on it tomorrow, or you can contact her directly.
Under the old rating system, there was an issue with players that had not played in a while starting over as unrated. Has this been corrected in the new system? Or should we continue to submit a membership request to make sure that these players’ ratings are up to date?
Actually that was a compatability problem between the old rating system and the new membership system. I think we corrected it in October by reloading the entire membership file on the old computers, but we did have a few months (March-October of 2004) in which a number of players who had been inactive since about 1999 were treated as unrateds again.
One of the reasons I’d like to be able to go back and re-rate most of 2004 is to fix all of the one who were mistakenly set back to unrated.
As long as we have the player’s ID and rating in computer-readable form, the new ratings system should find it. It checks several sets of records, including all of the supplement history files going back to 1992, though the preferred one is the crosstable detail, since we’re trying to find the post-event rating from someone’s most recent event based on the event ending dates.
The only ones that need membership/ratings department intervention are memberships that were completely purged from the old minicomputer system back in the 1970’s and 1980’s. For those, the old ID has to be reactivated and the old rating has to be looked up in paper or microfilm records and entered into the ratings correction table. For those you do need to file a membership exception request.
You should also file one if you discover duplicate IDs that haven’t already been flagged and corrected, but that’s a somewhat different issue.
Maybe I didn’t use the phrase “re-submit” correctly in my previous post.
When I first tried to submit the Winter Open 2005 tournament over 3 weeks ago, I used Tom Cieszinski’s “old” USCF ID that was not even in the system yet. The tournament was thus “rejected”. I then submitted the exception, etc.
What I did on Thursday (yesterday), was go to the “Upload/Edit USCF Files” page. At the bottom is a drop down selection that has WO2005. I chose that tournament and then clicked on Submit. My credit card information was given, and my credit card was charged for the rating fee.
I’m pretty sure that is what I did yesterday. I sure hope the event does not get rated twice.
On Wednesday this past week, the MN Open (played the previous weekend, and also with Tom Cieszinski) was held. From the time the MN Open was rated on Wednesday, until the time that I got the Winter Open 2005 tournament rated, I received several e-mails from players (and coaches), wondering why the MN Open was already rated but the Winter Open 2005 was NOT yet rated. It was clear that they thought this was a mistake or delay by the TD (me!).
Note, Tom Cieszinski’s rating does not yet have his information from circa 1972-1976. I hope the USCF can straighten this out sometime.
