Should people who post their intentions to manipulate the rating system have their TD license suspended?
Alex Relyea
A related question is: Should the USCF monitor the rating system for TDs or players who are abusing the ratings system and sanction them?
A number of examples have been highlighted in recent threads. Some were obvious cases of sandbagging, others were abuses of the match rules. A few years ago a number of events were deleted from the system because it could not be ascertained that they had actually been held.
What should the USCF do about the players in such events if it is apparent that they were not following the rules.
Moreover, those events generally could not have been rated had not there been a TD willing to submit it and an affiliate willing to have its ID used.
Should the TD and/or the affiliate be held responsible for the rating of events that appear to be attempts to manipulate the ratings system?
After all, the TD certified that the games complied with USCF rules, shouldn’t he or she be held to task if that appears not to have been the case?
I’ll answer your semi-rhetorical questions:
- No, not “monitor” (or at least not at any great deal of effort). Investigate complaints, though.
- Penalize them with a suspension or other appropriate punishment.
- Yes and/or yes. See #2
- Yes. See #2
I don’t consider those questions even somewhat rhetorical!
In the days when all events had to be processed by the USCF ratings department, we had someone making at least a cursory review of an event before it entered the system. I know they caught some problem events, but not all of them.
With online reporting, we no longer have that review, except to the extent that we can automate it.
That means we probably need to take additional steps to monitor events after they are rated to look for abuse, and probably need to be more agressive in terms of the actions we take when we find anything that looks suspicious.
TDs who either don’t care that their events are helping players abuse the rating system or worse yet are an active partner in the process should be dealt with rather harshly.
The Board will probably be making some changes in the match rules later this week that should take care of some if not most of the ways players can manipulate their ratings using matches, but that still leaves the other cases. The Ratings Chair has promised to send me some statistical measures to look for suspicious events, when I get them this this thread may become less of an academic exercise.
I took #s 2, 3, and 4 as a given. It seems obvious that a harsh punishment is called for. Isn’t this covered in the ethics section of the rule book? (Do you want additional sanctions that don’t have to go through the ethics committee?) You could even make a case for criminal charges given the size of some ratings-based prize funds.
On #1, I wasn’t clear how much effort you were talking about spending on the “monitoring”. Having the software automatically flag any truly strange reports and then investigating them sounds OK.
In this increasingly litigious society, any serious sanctions will almost certainly have to go through channels, whether that be Ethics or TDCC or just the Executive Board.
The ED already has the authority under our rules to impose a ratings change or a floor (or even a ceiling) on someone based on their tournament play, though this authority has not been used very often.
Some administrative sanctions have been upheld in court cases. A state can take a driver’s license without having to wait for a trial, for example. I could see suspending a TD’s certification pending ethics committee review. People don’t have a “right” to be TDs. The USCF certifies those that it feels (in its sole judgement) are qualified.
Now that I’ve said it, some lawyer will probably tell us why I’m wrong. 
Probably the existance of the MSA, where anyone can see the results would lead to catching more problems than the cursory review of the past. And hopefully it will lead to people not making the attempt because of the likelihood of being publicly caught.