When someone with an established regular rating plays in their first quick event. They start out with P/10 and end with how many games they ended up in the tournament. Since I have a 4 round event, they end with P/14. If someone does not have a established regular rating, they start out unrated not as P/10.
Why is this the policy for the two different groups?
That’s the way the ratings formula specifies a rating be initialized whenever there is other information that can be used to come up with a reasonable starting point for someone’s rating.
Players with a quick rating but no regular rating get their quick rating, based on 0 games. (I think that’s because quick ratings are deemed by the Ratings Committee to be less reliable than regular ratings.)
Those with FIDE ratings get their FIDE rating plus 50 points, based on 10 games.
If a person has a established regular rating, would only need to have 15 games, (between G/5 - G/60) to get an established quick rating. If a person does not have a established regular rating, the member would need 25 games before having a established quick rating. This is what I should tell the members when they ask?
Yes, that’s the way the ratings system has been defined by the Ratings Committee.
However, I think a better way of stating it is that someone with an established regular rating (or even a provisional regular rating based upon 10 or more games) would only need 15 ADDITIONAL games to have an established quick rating.
Also, the same for those provisionally regular rated with 10 or more games. With less than 10 regular rated games they start with a provisional based on that number rather than 10.
It does look like the new system fixed a glitch in the previous implementation. For tournaments which are duel rated it now appears that the regular and quick ratings for new players are both started as unrated. Previously, the games were regular rated first and then that provisional rating was used to initialize the quick rating. So for a 5 round event, new players would end up XXX/05 regular rated and XXX/10 quick rated. It was confusing enough to explain to beginners that they had two different ratings based on the same games without also having to explain how they were provisionally rated for twice as many games as they played.
It wasn’t so much a glitch as an unintended consequence of the way they handled dual ratings under the old software, assigning separate USCF event IDs for the regular rated and quick rated sections.
There was no way to tie the two sections together. Even if they had been separate sections under the same USCF event ID it would probably not have been possible to avoid having a quick-rated player wind up doubled-up game counts.
The new software will dual rate a section by setting the rating system field to ‘D’ for dual-rated.