For anyone running online US Chess rated events on Chess.com I’d like to bring your attention to a new feature in the latest version of SwissSys that should hopefully help with the rating submission process. The article can be viewed on the US Chess website at new.uschess.org/rules/swisssys- … ed-events/
+1
I don’t know how many have noticed, but if you look up any player on MSA using the U.S. Chess Player-Rating Lookup feature, you will see that everybody now has not five, but SIX, U.S. Chess ratings.
In addition to OTB regular, OTB quick, OTB blitz, online quick, and online blitz, there is a new one, online regular (slow). So far, it appears that everybody’s online regular rating is given as Unrated.
Obviously this means that U.S. Chess will soon be implementing online regular ratings. Let’s hope this change comes sooner rather than later.
I wonder if it would be OK for an organizer to run an online regular event now, perhaps using the new SwissSys feature, and submit it later for U.S. Chess rating, once the latter system is up and running?
Bill Smythe
The EB gave the OK to start the online-slow ratings system a couple of weeks ago. As I noted in another thread a while back, there are around two dozen programs that have to be modified to implement a new ratings system, some that deal with the process of submitting and rating those events, but most of them dealing with reporting the results on MSA.
Testing on the programs that deal with the submission and ratings aspects is under way, a few of the programs that deal with reporting the results have already been modified (as Bill Smythe noted), but until some online-slow events have been submitted, rated and included in a ratings supplement, there’s not much data to test with. Hopefully we’ll have this completed in time for some online-slow events to be submitted ahead of the ratings cutoff for the July ratings list, on June 17th.
Others are dealing with announcing and promoting online-slow events.
Some policy issues, such as how to initialize online-slow ratings, are still being evaluated. As I understand it, any event that is at a time control too slow for online-quick (corrected) will be included in the online-slow system. My understanding is that means that any online game with a total time per player of 30 minutes or more (MM+SS) will be online-slow. There will be no dual-rating of any games in both online-slow and online-quick like there is in OTB ratings.
The waiver of ratings fees for online events has been extended until July 31st.
Incidentally, there are actually SEVEN official US Chess ratings systems if you include correspondence chess.
It sounds as though there might be 2-4 weeks of programming still to be done before online-slow events can be handled fully.
I am hoping that the EB will authorize organizers to begin submitting crosstable reports of online-slow events immediately, even if the system is not completely ready yet. Such reports could then be held in the office for the time being, and rated later when the programming is finished. It might be a good idea for organizers to inform their players of a likely delay before their first few online-slow-rated events will appear on MSA.
Of course, the various platforms (chess.com, lichess, ICC, etc) probably have their own rating systems, and may be able to display post-event ratings from their own proprietary rating systems on their websites.
Bill Smythe
Right now we’re waiting for final decisions to be made on some policy matters, which may include when and how it is formally announced and when online-slow events can start to be held.
I think the programming to create online-slow events in the online editor is ready to go, but the code changes to actually compute online-slow ratings haven’t been written yet. It isn’t a huge change, because as far as I know the only change in the formulas is in the area dealing with how to initialize the online-slow ratings.
It may take some time for organizers to start scheduling online-slow events, too.
The cutoff for the July ratings list is June 17th, I don’t know that even if we announced this today if we’d have any online-slow events completed and rated between now and the 17th, so we may not be able to test some of the ways ratings data is reported until the August list is created in mid-July.
I think the policy issues have been resolved and would expect an announcement soon as to when online-slow events can begin.
Just noticed the announcement. new.uschess.org/news/us-chess-r … ar-rating/. It says the online regular rating system will be for games “in excess of 30 minutes” but I think what they meant to say was “30 minutes or more”.
Yeah, it should probably say 30 or more. I’ll recommend it be changed. I didn’t see the notice before it was posted.
Update: It has been corrected to ‘30 minutes or more’.
Is there still the lower K factor for players rated 2200+ if the time control has a “total playing time” of 30-65 minutes?
I hope not. It was a rather silly kludge to make it harder for players just below a coveted invite from trying to push their ratings up by playing in multiple short TC tournaments. Of course, short TC or not, they still had to have net positive results to increase their ratings.
That only applies to regular ratings in OTB dual-rated events, not online ratings.
I think the rationale behind that 2013 EB policy change was to help keep high rated players from qualifying for events like the US Championships just due to performance in games faster than G/66, although at the time I saw no indication that any high rated players had been doing that. For the most part, the high rated players stay out of events faster than G/66.