Below is a redacted version of an email responding to a complaint about a player with what appeared to be an inaccurate rating. (Names and IDs have been removed.)
The two players involved had identical names and the events in question were in the same area of the country. However, one of the players appears to be rated under1200 and the other around 1800, and this may have led to the higher rated player entering an under 1200 section.
I’m posting this in the Forums as a reminder to TDs that they should always ask to see the USCF membership cards for players they don’t already know, not just trust that they have found the right player on MSA, in the rating supplement or in the database in their pairing program.
If a player doesn’t have his or her USCF membership card, I’m open to suggestions as to what other steps TDs should take to ensure they have the right ID and rating for that player.
I noticed that my ID had been “borrowed” for several tournaments in PA a few years ago. It occured to me that it would not be difficult to look up an inactive life member and just give that name to enter a tournament. This is another reason to check IDs for players who are new to your tournaments. Players who don’t have a card can bring a copy of Chess Life, which still prints the USCF ID on the cover.
Best would be to use the ID from the player’s membership card or magazine (one reason to send a magazine with a membership). If the player does not have one then the following possibilities present themselves:
Refuse entry (which may mean that a player you don’t know would have an incentive to join with a tournament membership under a new ID that would later have to be merged into the original - a long-lapsed membership would make this a more attractive option, particularly since it would be more likely that a player would not still have a card or magazine). Considering the profit (loss?) margins some tournaments have, refusing entry is not going to be something that many organizers will be happy with.
Check in the supplement (preferably the most recent golden) or on-line for the ID (which gives the current problems when there are multiple entries for the same name, let alone things like possibly choosing the incorrect single entry for Robert instead of the Bob that the player entered under, or choosing an incorrect married name instead of the maiden name that is still listed for the player). A player showing a printed copy of MSA to prove membership is similar to checking on-line, and still does not avoid the potential duplicate name problem.
Giving TDs access to other information the USCF has about a member, such as birthdate, membership type, or address, would raise privacy issues, some more serious than others.
Personally, I’ve always thought giving out the 1st 3 digits of the zip code of every member would help me figure out if this ID is for the Mike Smith from Chicago or the Mike Smith from Peoria (both listed under IL in the supplement), and probably without giving out so much information as to raise privacy concerns. I could also see affiliates taking advantage of that information, which would help them see how many active USCF members there are in a 3 digit zip code area (say, Des Moines) versus how many there are in other parts of Iowa.
This might help prevent some innocent cases of ID errors, but would probably not help much with someone who is trying to hijack someone else’s USCF ID.
Moreover, no matter how much information we were to make available, anyone wanting to hijack someone’s USCF ID would have little trouble getting to that additional information, and thus would still have all or most of the information they would need to convince a TD that they are that other person.
However, the more errors we can catch (or better yet–prevent) the fewer opportunities there would be for someone to take advantage of any prior errors.
This happened in the World Open this year, except that the player had a copy of his birth certificate, some kind of photo ID and [i]an airline boarding pass and flight ticket,[/i] (and his [i]Chess Life,[/i] of course) which all matched the name of the hijacked ID. His mistake was using the identity of a player in NY with an ID number beginning with "100...." despite the fact that he looked to be in his twenties. Some suspicions were aroused, and upon some further questioning of how and when he joined the USCF, his recent tournaments, school history, NYC geography, etc., he began to waffle and babble. Later someone from Colorado thought he knew the player by a different name, as someone who had played in some Colorado tournaments (which may have been held at a college and may not have been rated). When the last round was about to start, we had found some players from that area who apparently had played in the same tournaments as that player, but under his original name, and we hand changed the pairing sheet so that it read that the player was paired against his alter ego from Colorado. The player, who had been doing pretty well in the tournament, was never seen during or after the round.
But what did you do for the actual (originally scheduled) opponent of this (these) player(s)? Give him a forfeit win? If the players on that board “had been doing pretty well in the tournament”, it could affect prize distribution.
Call me paranoid, but if someone showed up at my tournament with a birth certificate and ‘some kind of a photo ID’, which I assume was not a drivers license or other government-issued ID (the forgery or falsification of which is a crime), I’d be very suspicious.
I used to have an office across the street from the liquor store that was the closest one to the University of Nebraska campus. The owner of the store always had a stack of phony IDs he’d confiscated from students in the last few weeks, some of them were amazingly bad but a few were quite good. Every few weeks the police department would take the ones he had collected, I always wondered what they did with them.
BTW, his advice when dealing with a possibly phony ID was to ask the guy (it was almost always a guy) a bunch of innocuous questions, like where they live on campus and what year they are in school, and then throw in “What’s your birthday again?” Most of the time that’d trip them up.