Dear All,
As I understand it there is a rule in uscf that an event must be submitted within so many days after it has finished to the uscf.
However there have been some events that were not rated for weeks which I am guessing is because the organiser didnt put the event in to uscf in a timely matter.
I wish to know what are the penalties from the uscf for TD’s that don’t send there tournament results in to the uscf in a timely manner ?
Thanks
Jon Burgess
This subject usually comes up every year or so, at the TDCC Workshop at the USCF Delegates Meeting. I remember it was discussed there in Ft. Lauderdale in 2004. The workshop usually resolves every year to have the Office contact delinquent TDs, or to contact the TDCC.
In practice nothing usually happens, and some TDs take weeks or months to send in their tournament reports, again and again. A cursory glance at the Events Rated list in the February 2006 Rating Supplement, which for the most part includes events submitted in November and December of 2005, shows that it also included the ratings from more than a few tournaments which ended long before that-- one tournament which was rated for the February 2006 Supplement actually ended in 2004!?
I suspect that nothing happened to those TDs either. While there are theoretical penalties for submitting events excessively late, they are rarely enforced.
Maybe the re-rating procedure will help reduce the problem of events submitted late being rated out of order, but it still justifiably upsets players who expect to see their ratings reflect their results. Futher adding to the disappointment would be those who paid for memberships at the tournament, only to find that their memberships have disappeared into the same black hole as the tournament itself.
Too bad that the TD/A program doesn't tack on some hefty penalty to the rating fee when tournaments arrive months late!
I suspect most of the hold up are in scholastic tournaments where there are lots of non-member issues. I can recall where I had players play in my tournaments, and tell me that they paid their dues at a neighboring state’s scholastic championship held on the previous weekend. Those dues did vanish into a black hole in many cases, and I had to get the parents to pay again in order to get my events rated. (This was all pre-online submission)
Now with the online submission process I find myself far more diligent about making sure everyone is a current USCF member. There is such a good feeling about running a tournament on a weekend, and by Monday morning all the new memberships have been processed, and the tournament has been rated, and the OCD chess parents can go to the MSA and see how their child’s rating fared. 
I hate when a 200 player scholastic gets held up by 1 or 2 measly non-members falling through the cracks. Now if I could just have internet access at every school that run tournaments, I could really be sure about everyone.
The guidelines have not been changed since the introduction of online submission, they still call for the rating report to be mailed within 7 days.
Most reports are submitted within that time frame.
At least one TD who was habitually late and was asked about it replied that he thought he had 30 days to submit events, and he was doing the paperwork on his events once a month. (I suspect he’s still doing that, too.)
Players can file complaints about TDs that may lead, eventually, to having the TD and/or the sponsoring affiliate suspended. but that usually doesn’t do much towards getting those events submitted and it may leave an area without any TDs at all.
Perhaps if we get to the point where most events are advertised using the USCF’s Online TLA Service, we can use that list of events to do followups on late reports. (Some have even suggested that the USCF require that all events must be listed in the online TLA area to be ratable, but I don’t see that as reasonable.)
My suspicion is that if we did try to implement harsher measures, such as increasing the fees for online events if they are more than two weeks late, it would backfire on us–assuming there wasn’t a complete revolt against those measures.
Personally I favor using peer pressure and letting market forces work against TDs who don’t submit their events promptly, though again that will only help in areas where there are multiple TDs.
Weeks late is one thing, month(s) late is another.
When online submission first started, the tournament would not pass validation if there were non-members. Whether or not there was a concern that not rating a tournament which had non-members would backfire, or even if there would be a revolt against such measures, the tournament was not rated if there were non-members. Except that the TD could make an exception request, to cover an extenuating circumstance(s). Now, non-members do not even require an exception request, just an additional charge added to the rating fee.
The same approach that was used to ensure compliance with the player membership requirement policy could also be used to ensure compliance with the submission deadlines- by flagging late tournaments, and requiring an “Exception Request” to the normal time-frame, or an additional fee.
I"m not sure if scholastic events are more likely to be late, much less whether that is because of membership issues. We probably hear more about the late scholastic events, mostly because we hear from the parents.
As I recall, we used to have a late fee, but it was dropped.
One of my concerns with reinstituting a late fee is that TDs may decide to mail in their events without paying the late fee rather than enter them online and pay the late fee. Then we get back into the issue of whether or not to rate the event or hold it until the late fee is paid. (If we don’t at least threaten to not rate the event, we have little leverage over the TD.)
If we take the hard line approach and say that we will no longer rate events that are more than X weeks late, we’re in effect penalizing the players for the TD’s tardiness, not the TD.
From reading this thread it seems to me that we have a serious cultural problem that needs to be addressed. As someone signing up for an USCF membership I would have some reasonable expectations as to what benefits a membership entails. One of those benefits is a rating. It is implicitly understood that the rating must be timely in order to have value. By being indifferent to organizers submitting reports late the USCF is greatly reducing the value of ratings to the point where they could become meaningless. Letting market forces inspire organizers to submit reports on time is not an option. In some parts of the country there simply aren’t enough tournaments to provide choices. But more importantly it shouldn’t even get to that. By allowing organizers to engage in late submissions without consequences you’re failing to enforce the contract you have with players via their USCF membership.
There also seems to be some question as to what can hold up rating an event once the report is received. Given the USCF’s IT overhaul and comments on “re-rating” I came away with the impression that if a submitted report contains the neccessary information to allow rating then immediate rating of the event would proceed. This might mean that the financials aren’t in fact settled yet, but since the report is from a credible source and includes neccessary rating info the rating is allowed to proceed. If something transpires during settling of the financials that invalidates memberships then the event (and subsequent events that are rating affected) might need to be re-rated. This is simple transactional processing from an IT perspective. If this is not how things are being handled could someone from the USCF please explain the current process? Thanks.
I’m not sure what gave you the impression that because of rerating the USCF would rate events immediately regardless of the status of the rating report or the memberships of the players in that report.
Rerating is designed to deal with two relatively common situations:
Corrections to events (we process several of them every day.)
Events that are submitted out of order. This can happen even when TDs get their events submitted promptly.
We do have the membership exception request system and tournament memberships to help TDS get their events rated even when there are membership issues, but for the most part TDs are getting their events rated without having to resort to those.
Personally, I think that’s a positive development.
Rule 23C in the USCF rulebook should be followed, TDs should be expected to check their players for current USCF memberships except in those situations (all of them should be known in advance) where a player or a section is known to be exempt from USCF membership requirements.
Those three situations are:
Foreign titled players (GM, IM, WGM, WIM)
JTP events. (Any affiliate can run a Primary JTP event, for players who are in Grade 3 or below, scholastic affiliates can run in-school events for the players in their school up to grade 12.)
Events that are recognized and sanctioned by the National Congress of State Games. (States may have up to two such events per year.)
TDs can check their advance entries online and get membership status information that is no more than a few hours old.
Those players who don’t register in advance should carry their USCF cards and be expected to show them when registering. Players who renew online can even print out a temporary membership card to show TDs.
If all TDS did their homework in advance and/or during onsite registration and all players carried their cards, membership issues would seldom cause events to be delayed. (Actually, I suspect that most of the events that are really tardy are not delayed because of membership issues, though some TDs may use that as an excuse to not do their paperwork.)
Given a choice between dealing with a TD who does it “their way” (e.g. submitting events weeks late) or not having any tournaments at all, what would you prefer?
The USCF must be extremely careful in enforcing its “contract” with members. How good is that contract when the chess tournaments in the area are cancelled because the only TD was suspended? Will someone else fill the shoes? Take it a step further and you’ll see that USCF will lose money when those members don’t renew because there is no place to play.
Keep in mind that being being a TD is often a volunteer position and sometimes a thankless one at that. A small club can’t afford to pay the director anything reasonable or else the entry fee would be too high. And yet the TD has to sit around for hours and days watching games. He’s the first one to show up and the last person to leave. If there is a dispute, the TD has to resolve it and that sometimes generates verbal abuse (sometimes physical too).
Therefore it is up to us players–not the USCF–to push the TDs to do their job. If that means helping them, then so be it! We should appreciate that they are willing to take the organizational lead in the first place. Go out and support your local TDs. Attend their tournaments. Ask them what needs to be done. Become a club TD yourself (it is free and requires no test) and become the official assistant TD. And if TD habitually has trouble rating tournaments, see if you can assist (e.g. some older TDs are not as internet savvy as the younger generation).
Michael Aigner
Thanks, but you really didn’t answer my question. Reasons for re-rating an event may only be a subset of all possible reasons for not rating an event in the first place. All available information suggests that right now the USCF has the technical capability to rate and re-rate events at will, i.e. there are no technological barriers like absence of software or computing resources.
The data model suggests that only 1 piece of information is required from an organizer for players in his event in order to allow that event to be rated: proof of membership. So long as that requirement is met the event can be rated. In the case of renewing members the USCF already has an ID. In the case of new members simply assign an ID. All other information pertaining to any player in a submitted report can be added or modified after the event has already been rated as this information is not time sensitive whereas the rating definitely is.
Provided a report identifies only participants with proof of membership I can think of no reason for not rating that event ASAP. The only possible exception might be a conscious decision by the USCF to delay rating an event because they know it’s out of order with another event that is on its way or has just arrived. If you can give examples of the other sorts of things that can hold up the rating of an event I’d greatly appreciate it.
Well if you posit the discussion that way them it might as well be no tournaments at all. There are many reasons why current ratings are important. We have a huge number of scholastic players for whom current ratings are an important incentive. It’s not just for scholastics though. As a LM I’ve been on both sides of 2200 many times. Depending on which side you’re on can mean the difference between being invited to an invitational or not. And these invitationals might come along once in a blue moon. Perhaps you can understand why a player who’s been denied participation on account of a late report submission might be a little upset.
That’s unfortunate, but the rest of us shouldn’t be punished because a few bad eggs are operating without competition and proper oversight. This incidentally shoots down Mike’s earlier suggestion that we should rely on market forces to incentivize good organization/TDing. That clearly won’t work here.
If you can’t take the heat stay out of the kitchen. Prospective organizers need to do their homework. If the rewards don’t make it worth it then don’t do it. Nobody is holding a gun to your head. Many organizers do a fabulous job, both volunteers and those looking to be compensated. I completely disagree with your assertion that we should tolerate shoddy organization simply because it’s only offered by the poor volunteers. This is a contributing factor to why membership numbers have fallen off, not because of the number of available events but when you played in one it had serious deficiencies that soured the participants on USCF tournaments!
This is just silly. Obviously there are limits on what players can realistically do. It’s pretty much limited to choosing not to play in most cases. And what does that accomplish? Since report submissions are an integral part of the USCF’s requirement to provide ratings it’s not only within their pervue but is their responsibility to exercise some oversight and control over organizers. No amount of volunteering is going to solve these problems as the road to hell is paved with good intentions. If the quality of service is poor the USCF has every right to do something about it as organizers are clearly an extension of the USCF.
There is at least one other obvious reason why a tournament might be unratable: internal inconsistencies. More common with paper reports, but it’s quite possible to do it with a pairing program, especially if you enter the results after the fact.
It is true the the on-line interface kicks these back until they are resolved, but a) fixing it is up to the TD, and b) not all rating reports are submitted on line (though I believe it is now a majority).
I suspect we’re not on the same wavelenth here.
Rerating of an event is only possible AFTER it has been rated in the first place.
Rating of an event is possible when the event is free of errors that intefere with the ratings process itself.
That means all the ID numbers must be valid (so that we can establish everyone’s pre-event rating), the pairings and results must be internally consistent and we have the ratings system(s) defined.
Anything beyond that is an administrative matter.
We could, for example, rate an event even if the starting or ending dates are invalid. The results might not make much sense, because we might have the wrong pre-event ratings for players, but the event COULD be rated. (In fact, a small percentage of events are rated with the wrong starting or ending dates and subsequently corrected.)
We have even rated events under the wrong rating system and subsequently corrected them.
Most administrative matters affecting whether an event will be rated have to do with enforcing USCF policies.
USCF rules (specifically Rule 23C) require that players be current USCF members except for certain designated exceptions.
Therefore, it is appropriate within the context of adhering to USCF policy that we not rate events if there are non-members in it in violation of rule 23C.
There are other administrative checks, such as making sure that the TD is a certified TD or that the sponsoring affiliate is a current USCF affiliate.
There are also match rules which may keep an event from being ratable, even though as far as the data itself is concerned it could be rated.
Most of these administrative checks can be overriden at various levels.
For example, the office can rate an event even if the TD is not a certified TD or the affiliate has lapsed or is invalid. The office can also rate events even if there are non-members in them that are not covered by the stated exceptions.
My charter in developing the new ratings programming was to have it adhere to USCF policies, including a number of administrative policies.
It seems like you want to debate the administrative policies which cover when an event will be not be rated even though the data itself may be in ratable form, such as rule 23C.
That’s a matter for the USCF political process to decide, so debate of those policies here is certainly appropriate.
However, those administrative policies have nothing to do with the rerating process.
And in my opinion, those administrative policies really aren’t the prime contributor to late reports.
Online submission has been in the majority since last May, John.
As of this afternoon 72.4% of the events rated in 2006 were submitted online.
That represents 80.3% of the games rated in 2006.
By internal inconsistencies I’m guessing that you’re referring to data errors that directly affect generation of ratings, such as multiple players paired against the same opponent in the same round, etc. My discussion assumes basic validation to catch these errors and that they are immediately kicked back and corrected upon detection. I’m assuming some sort of validation takes place before a report is submitted to avoid these problems.
On my time scale, ten months is “very recent,” one notch up from “statistical noise.”
I think you’re arguing in a circle here. Certainly, if a rating report is submitted with no errors, then it can be rated at once. In fact, this is what happens with most on-line submissions. (I can’t say “all,” since I don’t know this with certainty, but it’s been the case with all tournaments I’ve uploaded.) If there are mistakes, the report will be kicked back, and the TD may do several things: fix them and re-submit, put it aside until later, or stick it in an envelope and let the USCF office deal with it. In either of the latter two cases, rating if the tournament is going to be delayed, and there is not a lot the USCF can do about it.
The tournament validation process will not let an event be rated if it fails any of several tests including internal consistency checks, valid ID checks and (in most cases) membership checks.
There are other test it makes, too. For example, we look at the players to see if there might be an incorrect (but valid) ID. We do this by looking at the age, state and ratings of the players and see if a few players don’t appear to belong.
The classic example I cite on this, one that really happened, was a master from NJ whose ID was mistakenly used in an event in which all the other players were 9 year olds from California. These days such an ID error would be flagged as a possible ID error and the TD would have to either change the ID or override that warning before being able to submit the event.
And those same validation checks are done regardless of how the event gets into the system. The only difference is that the USCF office staff can override most of those errors, whereas TDs can only override some of them.
An event with internal consistency problems that is mailed to the USCF office is going to be dumped back on the TD to correct, because the office shouldn’t try to guess how to fix those problems.
Yes, of course.
Regarding the ID numbers I assume that the USCF tries to resolve issues to the greatest extent possible. For instance, on a mismatch between name and ID you would just fill in the correct ID and notify the organizer. If it’s a new player without ID you simply generate one. The only ID issue that I can think of that would require organizer intervention is if neither a name nor its matching ID are in your database.
Given what appears to be a properly submitted report there is no reason to assume 23c rule violation. In other words, don’t take the time to actually verify, just proceed on the basis that it’s ok and simply re-rate later if that assumption was wrong.
No, what I’m after is understanding the process which you’ve explained very well. In particular I was most interested in the factors which could hold up the rating of an event. My gut feeling was that some of this was influenced by policy and that there wasn’t neccessarily a clean separation of concerns. Your comments seem to have confirmed this. Short of data validation pertaining to rating generation, there doesn’t seem to be any reason for not rating an event immediately. CPU cycles are cheap so why not rate the event first and then apply the policy filters to determine if the result should be used going forward? I suspect in the majority of cases the answer will be in the affirmative. If the answer is ever no, then simply re-rate any affected events.
My impression so far is that you rate the majority of reported events as soon as they are received, i.e. policy does not result in delay. Is that correct?
You mean late ratings. And I think you mean the main contributor to that is late reports, not execution of administrative policy. 
There are errors, and then there are errors.
If it’s an error in data required for rating calculation it’s obviously a show stopper. But an error in a player’s address or birthdate certainly has no bearing on rating calculation barring the policy issues identified by Mike.