Nolan,
How does the online system interact with the old system? Are events
rated when they are submitted online or when the next ratings batch
is run? Within a ratings batch are events rated in order of date? I assume that outside of a ratings batch events not sorted by date. You’ve mentioned that in the future we may rerun all the ratings just before
the supplement cut off to make sure they are in time order. Is this still the plan? If so, when do you think this would happen.
Thanks,
Mike Regan
The new ratings system will not be limited to weekly batch updates, because the concept of a weekly batch is no longer necessary and infrequent batching introduces unnecessary delays.
Technically we will still be running events in batches (because we can only rate one event at a time and have predictable and consistent results), but probably running the batch process every 10-15 minutes instead of once a week. Many batches will consist of just one event.
This will increase the number of events that are rated out of chronological order, which is why I believe we should periodically re-rate events to put them back in chronological order.
Right now around 20% of events are rated out of chronological order, sometimes MONTHS out of order. During November, for example, we rated 2 events from March, 11 from May, 7 from June, 12 from July, 21 from August, 130 from September, 518 from October and 73 from November.
Rerating could be a political landmine, because there are those who don’t believe the rerating will make any significant difference and there are those who believe that it will be too confusing to players whose rating changes because an event they played in some weeks ago is re-rated to put it into proper chronological order with other events.
My response to both issues is that rerating will put events in the order they SHOULD have been rated in. Someone whose interim post-event rating changes is only seeing the rating he or she should have had in the first place, if all of his or her events had been submitted and rated in the proper order.
The timing for rerating is still a bit unclear. The only time I think it is necessary is just before preparing a ratings supplement, because that the point at which interim post-event ratings become official ratings.
However, is a bi-monthly rating supplement still the best time interval, or should we consider a different frequency? It has been suggested that we do monthly rating cutoffs but only send out printed supplements every other month, for example.
Nolan,
Thanks, I agree that events should be rerated to put them in the right
order. I think that the easiest would be to rerun everything just before
the supplement cutoff date. It sounds like you might need to rerun the
previous six months to get the order correct. Would this take much time?
Until we get to total online, are the online ratings reports just added to
the next weekly batch?
Thanks,
Mike
Rerates may indeed need to go back six months. I don’t know yet how long that big a re-rate might take, 2-3 hours would be acceptable to me because I could schedule it to run overnight. Only those ratings that change as a result of the re-rate would be updated.
Until the new software takes over, events submitted online are copied out to a diskette and then loaded as if they had been submitted on diskette.
However, because events that are uploaded have already been validated for internal consistency, correct IDs and current memberships, they have all passed validation right away, so even with the extra step by the office we’re still saving staff time on those events. They also don’t have to be entered into the events received log by the office, since that’s done as one of the steps during online submission.
The schedule the ratings department is trying to hold to is that events submitted online by the morning before a ratings batch run will be included in that batch. Thus if there is a ratings batch run today (Wed, 12/15), which is the current plan, it should include those events submitted by 8AM on the 14th.
Mike,
I want to thank you for all your hard work and for getting the “almost-instant” ratings to become a reality soon! Speaking of that, approximately when will this be implemented? I have already been submitting memberships and tournament reports on line and it does work great! Once you are used to this, it takes no time at all! Great work!
I will be testing the rating programming against previously rated events in the next few days.
Assuming the testing goes well, I believe what we will do is run all events through the old system until the February Supplement is created in early January. That’s a good time to make a clean switch because they usually try to get as many events validated and rated as they can before each supplement.
Does this mean that tournaments will be rated “continuously” as they are received instead of rating events in large batches once every one or two weeks?
Events that are submitted online will be released for rating once they have passed any additional validation tests and the payment has been credited. (If payment is made online, the credit is applied right away, if payment is by check, the event will not get released for rating until the check has arrived in the mail.)
Exactly how this will work for events that come in through the mail is still being worked out. Most likely they will also be released for rating as soon as they have passed all tests, but I don’t know precisely how we’ll deal with validation errors yet.
We still have to rate events one at a time.
When an event is released for rating, it will be processed in the next pass through the queue of events waiting to be rated, which will probably be within a few minutes of when the event is released.