My understanding (and I might be mistaken), is that when I affiliate my school’s chess club with USCF, I can host in-house tournaments which are USCF-rated, even for my players who are not yet USCF members. Is this true?
If so, how does the ratings work when I run a tournament and not a single player has a rating?
Thanks in advance.
For information on JTP events, see secure2.uschess.org/TD_Affil/jtp.php
Whether an event is JTP or not does not affect your other question, having to do with how events are rated when no players have a rating yet. This happens fairly often.
We start by coming up with an estimated rating for each player. In most cases, this will be based on the player’s age, in years, times 50. Someone who is exactly 8 get an estimated rating of 400, someone who is 8 1/2 gets an estimated rating of 425, someone who is 10 gets an estimated rating of 500, etc.
We then use those ratings to run the rest of the ratings formula, first computing a preliminary rating for everyone then using those ratings to compute final ratings for everyone.
Yes. Mike Nolan and I disagree exactly how to explain it, but I’ll say that everyone has a rating, 50 points per year of age (fractions counted) up to age 26. For example, your next door neighbor likely has a rating of 1300P0. This doesn’t mean much, but what it means is that if he were to enter a section of all players at their absolute floors (100-150) and won all his games, that 1300 rating couldn’t go down. Similarly, if he entered the Open section at the World Open and lost all his games, his 1300 rating couldn’t go up.
It’s not ideal, but the system actually works pretty well for sections that are all unrated. Players with all wins or all losses are likely to have huge adjustments when they play their first “outside” tournament, but they’ll get ratings from just playing each other.
Alex Relyea
That’s not quite what 1300P0 means, Alex. It’s thrown into a linear programming equation as one of the possible outcomes under the special ratings formula. Once someone has 9 or more games in their pre-event rating, then the regular formula applies.
Tom Doan might be able to explain it better, I suppose.
Gee, I would like to start over again and have a beginning provisional rating of 3250!
A “based on 0” rating (generally 50 x age up to max of age=26) is (potentially) used in two places in rating a new player—in rating fellow unrateds in the first pass, and in breaking ties among equally plausible ratings. The first of these obviously matters quite a bit when a section is all, or mainly, unrateds, and not at all if the player plays no other unrateds. Alex described two instances where the second would apply. It also would apply if, for instance, a player had 500W, 2200L, 2200L. Because of the wide spread of ratings of the opponents, any rating between 900 and 1800 is considered equally plausible. Anyone 18 or younger would get a 900/3 rating, anyone 26 or older would get 1300/3, and ages in between would get (50 x age)/3.
The document offering guidance on JTP events has been updated to add information about JTP events run by home school groups.
Great! The EB just approved those changes at the meeting we finished on 3/31/19 (yesterday from when I am posting this)