In my experience of running rated online tournaments I have always entered the results from the platform (originally chess.com and then lichess.org) by hand into the rating report. This process is extremely boring. I wonder, however, if there is a more efficient process. Any thoughts?
I haven’t submitted any reports for on-line tournaments but the first thing that comes to mind is entering the pairings and results into a pairing program. That would help avoid some of the typos in the on-line form as well as potential time-out issues.
Alternatively, some of the pairing programs support uploading a cross-table as a tournament file (and then continue pairing or generate a rating report), so you could see if the cross-table from the on-line server can be downloaded to your laptop and then massaged for an upload to your pairing program. You might, however, lose information on the colors played.
Other than Jeff’s suggestion, I doubt there’s much that can be done in the way of improvement under the current ratings programming, but there may be room for changes in the next generation of ratings software, especially if we can come up with a new upload format that deals with some of the data limitations in the current 3 DBF file formats and is something that online chess services would be willing to implement. (The existing formats will still be supported, of course, though eventually sundowning them might happen.)
At one point in the deep COVID lockdown I wrote a scraper that would take the chess.com results and then generate the 3 DBF files after cross-referencing all the chess.com to USCF ID mappings that I had.
I don’t recall it being particularly difficult but then I was always available to troubleshoot when my program failed me.
I did a video on how to work with a chess.com tournament via SwissSys for US Chess some time ago. Here is the direct link to the “Exporting chess.com crosstable into SwissSys” portion of the video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SNi-CcBpF0&t=3040s
That is helpful. Thank you! However, is there any way to do something similar for lichess?
Do you have an tournament ID for a lichess tournament that you would be trying to rate? I wasn’t aware that lichess kept a US chess ID in the user profile.
I am not aware that is the case. You would probably have to manually enter the IDs into the pairing software. The issue is about transferring the results from lichess to pairing software.
Are you having Lichess manage the tournament? Or are you trying to manage the tournament using pairing software and just have Lichess run the games?
I have always done it where Lichess manages the tournament.
See, for instance, https://lichess.org/swiss/j8rtJ5GL.trf. Just replace the ID in that with the ID of your tournament. It will generate a FIDE TRF file which you should be able to pull into WinTD or SwisSys. You would then have to look up names and ID’s from the lichess userid’s.
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Thank you! You have been very helpful!
A set of command for accessing lichess information can be found at
Wow, looking at the account api, if Lichess would make a user block for USCF ID#, then you could even script the pull of usernames to grab the ID, and then in the same script pull the Lichess games, and put it all together.
Maybe Lichess would be willing to implement such a block in the user profile…
I’m thinking that’s unlikely. The profile information is self-reported and is publicly viewable so there might be at least some concerns about “security”. It allows for you to claim a FIDE rating and a US Chess rating (and a number of others) but if you want to say those are 3000, nothing is stopping you.
If you use Lichess to help run a tournament where you are feeding it the pairings, then you clearly should have the ID information on whatever program you are using to actually run the tournament—you need a mapping from US Chess ID/player name to Lichess userid to make that work. If Lichess is actually running the tournament, it uses its own ratings and its own rules. (For instance, I’m pretty sure you can’t do 1/2 byes.) If you are planning to submit for rating to US Chess even having the relevant ID isn’t enough—you are supposed to have name, state, rating which would have to be added anyway.
Lichess has made a number of changes over the past few years to make it easier to organize Swisses, and I’m sure it has been suggested more than once to add a FIDE ID. If there is no FIDE ID, I very strongly doubt that they would add a US Chess ID.
If you have the ID, the name, state and rating can all be easily looked up (and indeed aren’t even used when entering a USCF rating report through the online form).
But, again, if the Lichess profile included the US Chess ID (and it doesn’t), it would not be under the control of the TD. The profile is controlled by the user—the information could be absent, or could be wrong.The TD should have the information to map between US Chess ID to the corresponding lichess userid that you got when the player registered and should expect to use that to fill in the missing data to make a rating report.
This is literally a solved problem, as in between chess.com and USCF the two organizations already came up with a mechanic to link accounts in a way that USCF was happy with. There is certainly no technical reason a similar solution could not link USCF and lichess accounts, only political reasons (and I think lichess has been fairly clear they are not interested in doing USCF any favors).
https://support.chess.com/en/articles/8724735-how-do-i-connect-my-uscf-id-to-my-chess-com-account
The chilliness of the relationship between Lichess and US Chess aside, I get the impression that Lichess has decided to not actively pursue supporting “serious” externally rated tournaments.