When can I expect the new rating supplement to be posted in the TD/Affiliate section? It’s not terribly urgent, for me, this month, but next month I’m doing a tournament that starts in August, but uses the September supplement. Any ideas as to when they usually come out?
Alex Relyea
Don’t do that!
The August files haven’t been posted yet. It looks like the July files were posted on June 24th, the June files on May 21st and the May files on April 24th.
I agree with Ken, this is not a good idea.
I agree with Ken, too. Unfortunately, I’m not organizing the tournament, and in the pre-tournament publicity it says that September supplement will be used.
Alex Relyea
Well then - no problem. Just ask the Organizer for his copy of the September supplement.
Oh, you mean like how the 130th Annual New York State Championship should not use the September rating list?
The tournament in question (the 68th New England Open) will be held Saturday, August 30 through Monday, September 1. Since the September rating supplement is supposed to be available for tournaments starting in September, and since September 1 is Labor Day, I’m comfortable assuming the supplement will be available before the tournament in question starts.
By the way, I notice that the 68th New England Open does not appear in the online Tournament Life announcements (USCF Home > Clubs & Tourneys > Upcoming Tourneys) in either the Grand Prix section or in Massachusetts, even though there is a print TLA for the tournament. Did we need to do something special to have the TLA appear online?
Actually they have, in a sense. If you use the Player/Rating Lookup feature of this website and enter a member’s name or USCF ID#, you will see their rating as of the July supplement on the left, and the rating that will appear in the August supplement on the right. The August supplement ratings should move to the left at the beginning of August, and the ratings that will go in the September supplement should appear on the right sometime in early August (August 9th, I think?).
Of course, to use these ratings, you will need to have a computer with internet access at the tournament site. And you will need to be confident that the computer and the internet connection are both going to be functioning when you register everyone.
According to USCF’s TLA records, the New England Open TLA is scheduled to appear in only the August issue of Chess Life, not the July issue. The printed TLAs that are presently posted on the website are the ones from the July issue. The ones from the August issue will be available in early August.
There are actually several ways to get the next month’s ratings before the files are posted, including the custom ratings list feature on TD/A.
For events where there is no internet access on site, you can also get ratings from your cell phone if it is web-enabled. Go to msa.uschess.org and look for the section on ‘thin client’ access.
Sigh. That explains it. I was kinda sorta hoping that TLAs on the web site weren’t so closely tied to paper print schedules.
Thanks.
I understand, but TLAs are also a revenue source to the USCF.
If you wanted it in the July issue (and thus in the online TLAs during July) you could have purchased a TLA in that issue.
You could also have entered an online TLA using the ‘Online TLA Service’ feature on TD/A, which is currently free. Those TLAs appear at the bottom of the page.
More closely integrating the online TLAs with print TLAs is something we’re looking into, but how to balance that with the revenue aspects of TLAs is unclear, especially if the Goichberg Plan Internet-only memberships are approved by the Delegates next month.
Sorry, I gave the wrong impression. I didn’t mean to say that TLAs should appear online without having to pay for a print TLA. Rather, I meant I hoped that the online TLAs would be updated earlier than the first of the month. Once the TLA was paid for, I could imagine it appearing online (in an ideal world 
).
I was suffering under the mistaken notion that the online TLA service was currently unavailable. Stale information on my part? Or just hallucinations?
I’m not sure about showing the TLA online as soon as it is paid for. Consider a TLA for an event in late November that is paid for today but only appears in the November issue. Maybe it could show up a few days or weeks before the November issue is available, but probably not several months before then, as that could negatively impact TLA revenue. (As I said before, these issues need study in the light of whatever it is that the Delegates do next month.)
The Online TLA Service is still functioning though not heavily used and it has NO linkage with the print TLA system at this time. Hopefully that’s something we can do while giving organizers more control over entering their own TLAs.
I think the goal is to try to get the editorial content up on the website about the same time that the magazines start hitting member’s mailboxes, but the timing for when to put up the next month’s TLAs is less clear to me.
I think they extract the TLAs from the page proofs of the magazine. (I’m not the one who does that, so I’m not entirely sure of that, I’m also not sure how they merge that in with the previous month’s TLAs.)
One of the timing concerns is that there will be August events (usually ones in early August) that appear in the July issue but not in the August issue, and ones in late August that are in the August issue but not July.
We could probably extract the TLA information from the tracking system we use for TLAs, since it has the copy for the TLA, but sometimes there are last-minute changes to TLAs during the proofreading stage that may not get back to the TLA system. We’re still looking into this, there may be other problems as well.