I received an email about a month ago regarding a tournament in Albany, NY called the Cabin Fever Breakout for 21-22 February. I keep waiting to see if it’s been rated, and look at the website that was included in the email, but I can’t find anything about it. It also was listed on the online TLA section under (at least) Mass. and New Hampshire. Does anybody know anything about this tournament?
Alex Relyea
I can tell you that the affiliate ID was A6031811, ECLECTIC CHESS PROMOTIONS, but I don’t see any rated tournaments from that affiliate yet, it was only created in January, though.
The contact listed for that affiliate is Andrew Walker (an A player from NJ), who is not listed as a certified TD.
The tournament did happen, though it was a small event. I assumed it was a rated tournament.
I still don’t see any tournaments under that affiliate ID, and I only find two rated events in Albany NY so far this year.
I played in this event. It had 8 people in the G/60 section. The TD is new. He told us not to use delay because he didn’t see the point. It makes me think he hasn’t read the rule book yet. The TD is trying to submit the results, but is having difficulty following the procedure. He assures us that it will be rated soon. Look for it any day now. 
I think the Eclectic event was actually held in the Town of Colonie, and could come in as a Colonie, NY event.
OK everyone. We had the tournament, we submitted the ratings, we had to verify a warning, we checked for errors, we validated the ratings as correct, we submitted the ratings for validation, and we paid the rating fees. I’m new at this but I almost wish this process was back to the paper and pen, stamp-on-envelope days when eveything was uncomplicated. Now you have to have special programs, have a PC and not a Mac, be computer literate, be able to interpret the instructions that are written in legaleeze language that requires you to spend your all of your waking hours figuring it out, and have to log in to two separate areas to submit ratings. Next time it will go smoothly-I hope. So you can stop b & c’ing and get back to your regular lives.
First, I believe WinTD is available for the Mac. You check that out at Estima’s web site.
Next, you might find some FREE “how to” videos regarding WinTD, SwissSys, and USCF useful. To view the videos you can go to YouTube and search for “theeightytwentytd” or go to my sight: http://the80-20td.com/. I plan to add to the “basic” knowledge series after I correct some low sound problems with the current set of videos.
Once you’ve gotten over the learning curve you will begin to appreciate the automation. I’ve actually had a tournament rated and up on the MSA pages within hours of finishing the tournament.
Now that you are set up as a TD you should only have to log in as that to submit your report. I’ve found the most important thing is to make sure every player has a valid USCF ID and isn’t expired. Occasionally I will get a tournament to have no warnings or errors etc on the first pass but most times you will have some warnings. I use the email that the USCF sends to review the errors and warnings. Bottom line now that you have everything setup the next time will be much easier.
It takes prep work before and during the tournament, but TD/A (with on-site internet access) gives you the capability of rating the tournament during the awards ceremony (if there is one - such as for a multi-hundred player scholastic tournament). Then players might be able see their rating change by the time they get home.
It’s up. Cool. And I learned where South River, NJ is too.
The software isn’t Windows, but USCF isn’t Microsoft either. I’ve knocked USCF as much as anybody, but in this area I think
“B’ing and C’ing, and get back to your regular lives?” I am guessing what that means, but it isn’t good customer service, especially over a legitimate inquiry. It’s not selling me on the potential chess experience there, that is for sure.
Back then, if the tournament wasn’t rated, you could just tell everyone it was because the Ratings Department had messed up, again.
They had to move it years ago to make room for the big shopping mall.
I’m pretty sure B & C’ing is the regular life around here.
Then again maybe not. 
Today I uploaded a small two section tournament and bam got 5 errors right off the bat.
Fortunately the email tells you pretty much what they are.
All 5 of mine were caused because of basically a typo. I had the start date at 03/28/2009 and the end date at 02/28/2009
So that should be easy enough to fix. I went in and corrected the date in both sections and figured that should do it. But no now I still have 3 errors. Back to edit. Oh there still is a date for the tournament as a whole. Ooops it is grayed out and won’t let me change the end date.
Well ok, so let’s delete this upload and start over.
No typos and everthing is zero errors.
Moral of the story. Pay attention to the small details.
Another way to deal with an incorrect ‘tournament ending date’ is to copy the event, changing the ending date, which will create another event with a different event ID.
That step is necessary because we use the tournament ending date to generate the 12 digit event ID.
I have to admit the process worked as designed in preventing a wrong ending date being submitted.
At one point I looked through the database and found a number of events where the ‘event ending date’ was not one that ANY of the sections had as the ending date of that section.
Most of those were rated prior to the current programming.
We require that the starting and ending dates of each section be within the range of dates given as the starting and ending dates of the tournament, but don’t go beyond that.
Since the primary purpose for the event ID these days is to help people FIND an event (you can enter ‘20080522’ as the event name on MSA and it will find all tournaments that ended on that date), as well as to break ties between two or more events (really, sections) that have the same starting and ending dates when deciding the order in which to rate those events, there’s not much value in deliberately submitting an event with a ‘wrong’ event ending date.
BTW, if you look this event name up, the city/state are listed as South River NJ, which is quite a distance from Albany NY. (But that’s how the TD submitted it.)