Is the 42nd Annual World Amateur Team & U.S. Team East to be FIDE-rated? Prior years’ events have been FIDE-rated, but this year’s TLA does not specify that the event will be FIDE-rated, nor does the tournament appear to have been registered with FIDE. Please clarify.
Joan is checking with Steve Doyle, but the TLA as given to her did not indicate that the USATE is FIDE rated this year, nor was that mentioned in the email blasts that went out for that event.
Per Steve Doyle, yes the 2012 USATE is FIDE rated.
We can get the online TLA updated tomorrow and will get it registered with FIDE as soon as we can. (Walter Brown is out of the office this week.)
Will the TLA be updated to include the delay time, d/5, also?
I just know some joker is gonna make a stink about the delay time not being listed in the TLA, as an excuse not to set delay on his clock…
The issue of delay setting was not addressed. (The standard setting is still d/5 per the rulebook.)
The office staff have not been instructed to require delay/increment information in all TLAs, nor was that specifically part of the rules change passed last August.
Can someone clarify which games are FIDE rated? It can’t be all board 1 games (I’ve been on board 1 for two years and haven’t shown up in the FIDE rating reports), and it can’t be all games between FIDE-rated players (unrateds have shown up on the report). Thanks.
You can see the last four rating reports here: http://ratings.fide.com/arbiter_hist.phtml?event=2049309
Games are rated between two FIDE rated players, and between a rated and an unrated, but only for the unrated. For a tournament to count as an unrated, you need to play 3 or more FIDE rated opponents and score at least 1 point. Also, FIDE does not publish a rating until you compile 9+ games over multiple tournaments.
As best as I can tell, member 14078453 did not play any FIDE rated opponents at USATE 2010 and 2011. Typically players rated over 2000 USCF may have an international rating. There are some exceptions among A and B players, decreasing as the rating drops.
Michael Aigner
Not quite:
It is POSSIBLE to achieve the nine games in just one event, but not very common.
Unless the event is a ten player round robin, which is how I got my FIDE rating (thanks, Alex and Ken!). As long as there are at least four FIDE rated players, every player scores at least one point and there are no forfeits, every unrated player in the round robin gets a rating.
Actually, only the unrated players need to score at least one point (B.02.8.21).
Preparing the FIDE rating report for the USATE must be a very time-consuming task. I know the tournament uses WinTD, which (unless I’m missing something) really doesn’t have good support for producing the Krause format rating report FIDE requires. (SwissSys has a definite advantage with respect to FIDE support, but, with all possible respect to Thad Suits, I can’t begin to imagine running the USATE with it.)
I’m guessing the office has to prepare the rating report manually. From a quick look through last year’s event, it seems there are not many FIDE unrated players listed in the report who had no FIDE rated opponents. (Those players would be extraneous, since games between two FIDE unrated players do not count in a Swiss.) Compiling the report with just the necessary players must be a bit of a “hat trick.”
Ditto! Thanks JD!
Walter has said he can generate the Krause format from the final WinTD data file.
The reason the USATE takes so much time to prepare is probably because Walter has to issue FIDE IDs to players who don’t already have them and take out the players who did not play any FIDE rated opponents. (Under the current FIDE rules, a player without a FIDE rating who plays even ONE FIDE rated opponent has to be included, because that player MIGHT have previously met the ‘3 games 1 point’ requirement.)
Given the type of tournament the USATE is, does the organizer have to pay a flat fee to FIDE or a per game fee?
Swiss events pay 1 Euro per player, but that (currently) only includes those players who had FIDE ratable games, not all 1100 or so players in the USATE. As the minimum FIDE rating continues to go down and more USCF members get published FIDE ratings, that fee is probably going up, because more players will face FIDE rated opponents.
As I understand it, the organizer doesn’t pay anything to FIDE, but the federation (usually USCF) does. The question should be how much does the organizer have to pay USCF.
Alex Relyea
There are two issues with regards to charging for FIDE rated events.
- How much will the USCF eventually have to pay FIDE? FIDE bills the USCF no more than twice a year, the office might not know the exact charge for months.
This issue is particularly relevant at the moment since FIDE is not currently charging for rating Blitz events. Most people assume that eventually they will charge for them, but nobody knows when or how much yet.
- How much should the USCF charge organizers for the time it takes to prepare rating reports to submit to FIDE? In the case of the USATE, Walter Brown will generally spend two or three days working on it. Even at the minimum wage, that could be $100 or more.
Again, this is relevant if the USCF is to start sending Blitz events to FIDE.
A complicating factor here is that the USATE is a USCF national event and the USCF shares in the profits from it.
Ken,
What is it about SwissSys that makes it not able to run USATE? I’ve used it for fixed-roster team events in the past.
A related question is why is WinTD preferred for running national scholastic events?
Thanks,
Mike Regan
I think the largest problem SwissSys would present for the USATE is the way it handles alternates. Bear with me; I don’t have a good way of wording this, so it might be confusing.
When doing pairing for a fixed-roster tournament, SwissSys pairs teams as one would expect, but SwissSys also pairs the individual games within the match at the same time. This is perfectly fine unless alternates are involved. The SwissSys documentation suggests dealing with alternates by switching players manually in the pair chart. The alternates are listed at the bottom of the pair chart with zero point byes, so one can correct the individual pairings by using the “switch players” control. Note this could require several switches to handle the regular team members moving up a board.
The practice I’ve seen at fixed-roster tournaments using SwissSys is to have team captains/coaches notify the director before the pairings are made about the alternate. The director then gives the regular player a zero point bye for that round, and SwissSys automatically pairs the alternate in the proper board order. But there’s nothing in the rules that says the captain has to decide who plays in a given round before the pairings are available (and I don’t think there should be such a rule).
WinTD handles this much more elegantly. It pairs the teams and ignores the individual pairings until the director enters the results. At that time, WinTD brings up a dialog for each match. The window shows the players on each time in board order. The top players on each time are selected, so if there are no alternates, the director just clicks the “OK” button. If there are alternates, the director just makes sure the right players are selected.
That’s an awkward description, and it might not mean anything if you haven’t actually seen it. Here’s a rough description:
White team Black team
* Allen * Alice
* Bob * Brenda
* Charles * Carol
* Dave * Denise
Edward(The asterisk indicates the player is selected.) Now, suppose Charles did not play the round. The director would unselect Charles, select Edward, and then click OK. WinTD would then present a window with the pairings Allen-Alice, Bob-Brenda, Dave-Carol, and Edward-Denise in which the director would enter the results.
This turns out to be a perfect match to the way results are reported in the USATE. There are no pairing charts with individual games. The teams complete a team result card with the four games listed.
For a small event, switching players around in the individual pair chart to deal with alternates is feasible, though still error prone. With almost 1200 players listed in the pair chart, it becomes a nightmare.
I can’t speak to why WinTD is preferred for national scholastic events, but I’m guessing it’s the program the pairing TD is used to using.
At one time setting up a tournament in SwissSys as an individual/team had to be done before the first round was paired. Skipping that step and trying to set the flag later meant undoing the pairings and results for all rounds, copying the players to another section that was set up properly and then redoing the pairings and results, which is a real pain if you don’t notice it until the third round is paired. With WinTD it is a simple radio button that can be done at any time. That one feature moved a number of TDs of scholastics from SwissSys to WinTD (I was one of them).
The drag and drop from overall master files to WinTD tournaments was also slick for the time.
There were other features that jumped out at me at the time as being better in WinTD, but I don’t actually remember what they are, but rather just that there were others (I switched last century).
I expect that by now Thad has adjusted SwissSys but WinTD has what might be considered an entrenched loyal base among many of the more experienced scholastic TDs and the TDs trained by them (and the TDs trained by those TDs and so on and so on).