A tournament starts on the 1st of the month when the current supplement is published. No wall chart is posted. After round 1 you notice some (maybe all) of the players have been paired using the prior month’s rating supplement. This not only affects pairings, it affects under prize eligibility. You speak to the TD and he indicates it doesn’t matter. He says he looked the ratings up. So it’s clear he’s not using a data base and has looked some ratings up on the individuals general tab before the November Supplement appeared there instead of referring to the Rtg. Supp. tab.
Is there anything you can do? I asked that the rating be changed in SwissSys for my son but that doesn’t really fix it for the whole section. Anyone who has recently gone above or below the under prize amounts will be affected. They may be eligible for prizes they wouldn’t have been eligible for if the right ratings were used or they will not be eligible for prizes they should be eligible for.
This is so disappointing when you spend time and money traveling for an event and a Local TD practicing for 16 years doesn’t use the right ratings and is looking things up instead of using the data base. I actually emailed this TD in advance giving him my family’s Nov Supp ratings and IDs.
While there are always exceptions, and I’m not smart enough to think of all such applicable circumstances, as a general rule, there’s no good reason not to use the most up-to-date ratings. Perhaps a TD has a prior supplement loaded, is having technical difficulties getting the current supplement loaded, and needs to get the first round started, so he doesn’t do the individual MSA lookups right then. Even in that case, though, the TD should do everything in his power to get updated ratings for each player into the pairing program as soon as possible after round 1 starts.
(I’m skipping all root-cause analysis here, so questions like “Why wasn’t the current supplement loaded well before the event?” are not being considered.)
Using the most current rating list, unless other lists are specified in advance, is a USCF rule. If a TD refuses to follow that rule, a directly affected party (read: participant in the event) can file a complaint about this situation with the national office. I suspect a parent or legal guardian of a participant would be considered a directly affected party, as (s)he legally speaks for the participant. I further suspect that whatever committee ended up with this complaint would not be happy with the TD in question, assuming all material facts have been accurately related and are essentially as characterized by the OP.
I’m doing a tournament this weekend as well. I don’t use the USCF supplement, but rather a custom supplement that can’t be made until the first of the month (in FIDE-land). I made a special request to have it done ASAP (thanks, Mr. Ballou) and I’m using the current ratings.
I know there are some TDs who don’t like to use the supplements, claiming the excuse of inaccurate ratings for rapidly rising players. I think that the ability of a player entering a tournament in advance having the ability to know what section(s) he can play in, and what class prizes he’ll be eligible for far outweigh this perceived disadvantage.
The logical solution here would be to allow a player, if he so requests, to use his updated-but-not-yet-official rating, but only if it is higher than his official rating. No doubt that would require advance notice in pre-event publicity.
Bill, maybe things have changed, but I have always allowed players to use an updated rating if it is higher than the official rating, and I’ve never pre-announced it; maybe I was in error, but that has been years ago. I would never let someone use a lower rating, however.
To the OP, I don’t know if you’re arguing that the paper supplements are not a substitution for the database or not, but as far as I know, the paper copy is valid provided it is for the period of the tournament.
It’s not an excuse, it’s a legitimate reason Alex (a player with a 1500 unofficial (current) rating but a 1300 official (stale) rating should not be able to win a U1400 section). For some events such as quads, players won’t know what section they will be in ahead of time. For some other events, using more recent ratings is still generally enough advance notice.
Also, most players I have talked don’t know the difference between official and unofficial ratings, when the cutoff is for official ratings, etc.
One of the reasons that I do not like to hold a tournament, especially a scholastic tournament, on a weekend where the start date will be the first of the month is because of the ratings changes that are going to happen which affect advance entries. It takes time to check all of the changes, maybe hundreds of them, so it is easy to use the previous official monthly rating rather than the latest super duper up to date rating that changed on the third weekend of he previous month for some folks but did not change for others. If a player requests that I use a higher rating for pairing and prizes, no problem. Otherwise, I will use whatever is officially listed on the MSA record just to be consistent.
The bigger problem for players is when entering a bid tournament well in advance to get discounts on entry fee. You want to know which supplement will be used. For example, if the World Open starts on July 1, but you sent your entry fee in March, which supplement will be used, June or July? This affects what further tournaments a class player competes in, or if he should play at all, in other tournaments before a big tournament so that his results do not change his section.
I’m not talking about using the higher of the two, but using the most current (unofficial) ratings, regardless of if they are higher or lower for player.
Back when the supplements were still bi-monthly there was an organizer who was taking the advance entries and using the most current unofficial rating (no rating class prizes). I contacted the chief TD and the organizer was informed that the supplement ratings would be used since there had been no advance notice of the practice.
One big problem with using the most recent rating is that you can end up using a rating that is then changed by a re-rate, and thus having a rating on the wall chart that no longer appears anywhere in a player’s tournament history or supplement history.
Another problem is that you either have to recheck all of the ratings after a re-rate or you have to accept that sometimes people will discover that you aren’t actually using the most recent rating for all people (probably going into the ultimate or penultimate round when the player in question is in line to win a prize in a section that the new unofficial rating would have prevented the player from entering). Using the supplement gives a fixed point of time easy to verify.
With the exception of major events, for which members plan months in advance to attend, thus justifying the use, say of the prior months supplement, really,
it makes far greater sense to use CURRENT ratings. This is particuraly true of
areas in which there are ratings explosions in large numbers of young players.
Really, how much sense does it make to use say a rating of UNR, 240, allowing
a youngster with 10-15 rated games to play in a U400 section who has a current
rating of, for example purposes, 635?? This is nonsensical. And as such, and to
comply with USCF rules, I simply state that Current Ratings will be used, and
section placement SOLELY at chief TD discretion. In short, if they do not agree
with my decisions here, they can get a refund and not play. Not a big deal whatsoever. If folks do not like, why, by golly let them run their own events.
My job is to run quality USCF events, not to be loved.
Ah, yes, Jeff had a post in the last moment about parents finding out at some point that say in one case the TD is allowing a kid with a current rating of 700
with 5 games to play in a U600 section (because in this specific case, the kids
prior tournament was in a U300 section, in which he went 5-0 defeating no one
above 300. Thus, while the kid should not be eligible for a U300 section, certainly a good option would be to list him as UNR and let him play in the U600
section). This is where the very useful phrase “solely at chief td discretion” comes in. ie, I could care less whether said parent agrees with me or not. irrelevant. By entering the tournament, they agree to the clause. Those who
have attended the many tournaments I have directed, over the years, come
to trust this judgement, and to understand that in the vast majority of cases,
that these decisions prove to be correct. For those new, learning is not a bad
thing.
Last, we have access to the most current ratings. And while rerates sometimes
to affect small changes, for the most part these are small, very small. It seems to me that not using current ratings, esp, for local events is kind of akin to driving a model T. Perhaps stylish, but not “with the times”.
And this is a big part of the problem. As an expired club TD with only thirteen tournaments under your belt, you’ve repeatedly shown an unwillingness to even consider that ANTDs and NTDs with many times more experience just might have a point on some of these issues.
