Can someone explain to me the difference between published ratings and the ratings in the tournament history tab when I look myself up on this web site? I understand that there’s a cutoff at the beginning of the month, and those are the published ratings until the next cutoff.
But this time around, it appears that my new published rating this month isn’t even close to the ratings listed on my tournament history. A week ago, my rating dropped to 1319 in the tournament history tab, but my new published rating today is 1343. So obviously, last weekend’s tournament isn’t counted in that. But before that, my tournament history says my rating was 1336. Is the 1343 based on those results, with the 7 point difference just being a slight statistical difference after the official month end calculations were done? Or is that previous tournament also not counted (in which case, I’d expect my rating to be closer to the 1370’s)? Yes, I’m well aware that my rating has been headed in the wrong direction lately…
Also, if the 1343 is just a stastical alteration of the results that led to the 1336 in tournament history, then will my tournament history going forward be adjusted for that? ie My tournament history shows that I dropped from 1336 to 1319. Since I lost 17 points, shouldn’t that now be 1326 instead of 1319, since I dropped 17 from a different starting point? I’m sure that will be dealt with at next month’s official recalculation, but will my next rated tournament show up in tournament history based on a change from 1319 which is no longer an accurate starting point?
If I’m understanding this all correctly, then it seems like as long as I’m playing at least one tourney every month, the rating under my tournament history will end up being a moving target that will become less and less accurate with time, unless the recalculation done at month end is applied there as well.
–Richard B. Becker
(USCF id # 12860037 so you can see what I’m talking about)
I’m going to make a guess. The U1400 games in the FL state championship were listed as occurring on 9/3 and submitted/rated on 9/4. That probably gave you the 1343 rating as of the October cutoff. The Misc game in the same tournament was listed as occurring on 9/1 and submitted/rated on 9/8.
Due to rerating, the 9/1 Misc game preempted the 9/3 U1400 games and resulted in your rating going to 1336 without ever seeming to hit the 1343 that was your “current” rating from 9/4 to 9/7.
This is normal noise caused by events being rated by the playing date listed in the submission rather than in order of submission.
Published ratings have always been the ratings as of a particular point in time, recently that has been as of about 11:30 PM on the 1st Friday of each month.
Since new events can come in after that (even if played several weeks or months ago) and corrections can be made to events, the post-event rating from the event that the published rating is based upon could change several times in the days and weeks after that ratings list is created, because of rerating.
Jeff has correctly noted that there was an event from early September that was not rated until September 8th, the day after the October Ratings List was prepared. Thus, on 9/7 when we generated the October Ratings List, your most recent event was section 4 of the Florida Championship. Your pre-event rating at that time was 1377 and you dropped to 1343 in that event, but after that September 1st game (from a collection of miscellaneous games from that event?) was rated your pre-event rating for section 4 of the Florida Championship dropped to 1368 and your post-event rating dropped to 1336.
You would have to ask the TD why the extra games event was submitted that way and not submitted or rated until the 8th, the USCF can only rate what the TDs send us when they send it to us.
The “extra” game was a round when I had a bye, so they paired me against someone who had a bye in a higher section for that game. I don’t know why the misc section is listed as Sept 1, when it should be Sept 1-3, just like the rest of the sections. Actually, that game was played on Sept 3 for me, in the last round of the tournament, so it would be most accurate to rate it last. In this case, I doubt it matters, though, since I dropped rating points in both “sections” from just playing badly all weekend.
I didn’t realize that the cutoff for the Oct 1 published ratings was so early in September. That’s why I was confused about why the more recent tournaments weren’t included in the new published rating. So now whatever gets rated this week will end up being my published November rating, since the cutoff is this Friday?
As I said before, you would have to ask the TD who submitted the event why he used September 1st as the event ending date for the supplemental games from that event. If that was in error, it can be changed but changing the ending date of an event is a bit complicated, because the 12 digit event ID is based on the event ending date. (Usually that means deleting the event and submitting a new event with the correct event ending date.)
3 years ago there would have been NO September games included in the cutoff for the October ratings list, because that was our policy for many years. Now we include all the games we know about, ie, all the games rated by the cutoff.
The rating list cutoffs are fairly early in the month largely because of the deadline for getting the labels for the October issue to the printer. We certainly want official ‘October’ ratings on the October issue of the magazine, that means we have to have the ratings done in time to get the file to the printer, which means by about 7-10 days into the month. We do the cutoff on a Friday evening because that gives us time overnight to run any needed rerates, usually without missing the first ratings pass on Saturday morning these days, and it also seems to have the smallest impact on the office.
As I said, I doubt if it matters much what order the games from that weekend are rated for me. Maybe it means a rating point or two, but I don’t really care about that.
So from your statements, I’m assuming tournaments are supposed to be rated in order of ending date, regardless of what order they’re submitted by the TD? I know that 5 years ago, it didn’t work out that way. My 3rd and 4th tournaments were rated out of order, when I played in tournaments on back to back weekends, and the second TD submitted results to USCF faster than the first.
If you check now, you should find that your 3rd and 4th tournaments are now rated in the proper order (that is, if they are reasonably recent).
Largely because of the massive explosion in available computation, tournaments are rated, and re-rated, and re-re-rated on a regular basis, always using the current “best known data”. It’s moderately simple to do, and has many useful side effects.
The one possible negative side effect is that individual ratings can change, even when the player has not played for a long time. This can be confusing. It was originally considered to be a serious issue, and probably delayed re-rating by a year or three. It turned out that it was less confusing than we feared.
If by ‘3rd and 4th tournaments’ you mean the ones you played in back in 2002, those have NOT been reordered, they’re still shown in the order in which they were rated, not the order in which they were played.
For events rated on or after 1/1/2004 (the so-called rerate window), we now show them (and rate them) in the order in which they were held. (Events that ended before 1/1/2004 fall into two types, those that were initially rated before 1/1/2004 and those that were initially rated on or after 1/1/2004. The former are all placed in ‘date rated order’, the latter are all placed after all events that were rated before 1/1/2004 but before any events that ended in 2004 or later.)
There have been several discussion here and elsewhere regarding moving the rerate window back further, in my opinion it would be a major effort to get events cleaned up enough to do so, and in the long run I doubt it would have much impact on the current ratings for most even modestly active players.
For the record, the complete sort ordering is as follows: