USCF Rating Foreign Tournaments

[nolan]

Of the 203 players who have had an adjustment to their USCF rating based on performance in FIDE rated events in the last year, 11 were not current USCF members.

[LaughingVulcan]

@rfeditor

This originally came up (decades ago) because of a few GMs who played almost exclusively in foreign tournaments, resulting in distortions in invitations to things like the U.S. Championship and the Olympiads. Many things have been tried – weighted averaging USCF and FIDE for invitations, activity bonuses, etc. The current version is fairer and less arbitrary. It does have a minor effect on lower-rated players, who might conceivably get in a rated game in some country without paying USCF dues. But this effect is utterly trivial, and is an awfully minor side effect of adjusting the ratings for greater accuracy. If, instead or “rating foreign tournaments,” the USCF simply described it as “calculating a FIDE-rating adjustment factor,” it would have the same effect without allowing the verbalisms which underlie your complaint.

I can’t argue that; the whole issue is de minimis, as I’ve indicated twice, and I accept what you’ve written. However, I appreciate the explanations given as well as the history behind it. I also appreciate the numbers which prove how minimal the situation is, thanks Mike!

Questions that may be odd or nonsensical crop up in my brain. Could a player who has never had a USCF record flag themselves as a USA player with FIDE? I know players sometimes switch their affiliation with FIDE, but nothing more than that.

And, if so, would they “obtain” a USCF rating without ever having being a USCF member? I would assume not, given the point is adjustment of an existent USCF rating. But too many of my assumptions turn out to be incorrect.

I’m sure that these things are also minimal. The point is not to complain, just to understand.

[nolan]

Could a player who has never had a USCF record flag themselves as a USA player with FIDE?

Actually, it happens fairly frequently. Suppose a US citizen living in France plays in a FIDE event there. The French chess federation is likely to put him in as a USA player not a FRA player. (Players don’t put themselves into the FIDE database, the FIDE member federations do that, or send the information to the FIDE office.)

It is probably more likely to happen as a result of an error or miscommunication, though.

Each time a new FIDE list comes out, we look for players with games on that list coded as ‘USA’ for whom we have no USCF ID → FIDE ID linkage. There were 10 of them on the January 2010 FIDE list. I don’t know yet how many of them do not have a USCF ID.

In most cases, it just means that we haven’t added the FIDE ID to that record in our database, but sometimes there are players that are obviously not USA players or that we have no way to connect to a USCF ID. Some of these are errors in the FIDE database.

Dealing with those takes up some of Walter Brown’s time each time the list comes out. If we can convince FIDE it is an error, they will correct it without charge. (Normally there is a fee charged for a player to change federations.)

If a player doesn’t have a USCF rating, we cannot process any FIDE adjustments for that player. (It’s possible that we could process a FIDE adjustment against a player with a provisional rating, though I don’t know if that has happened.)

[nolan]

bumping to the top, question asked in another forum has already been answered here.

[CamasChess]

World Senior had several USA players the last few years and they got their results USCF rated. Jude Acers lost is 2400 USCF rating because of that. He had not played in USCF rated events for years. He is a USCF member.

Russell Miller Camas WA

[David_Ames]

@nolan

The rating of all USA-flag players in foreign FIDE events is a Board policy, one that has evolved a bit over the last three or four years to its current form. (It started out as only rating participation in a small set of events, such as the Olympiads and the World Youth Championships.)

Similarly, I believe there is a Board directive that only current USCF members have access to the USCF Issues forum.

Dual rating of G/30 to G/60 as both regular and quick rating dates back to 2001, as I recall, and was the result of a Delegate motion in 2000.

The bolded part above seems to focus the issue.

[artichoke]

@nolan

… If we can convince FIDE it is an error, they will correct it without charge. (Normally there is a fee charged for a player to change federations.) …

Gosh that’s awfully nice of them. But what about our fee for debugging their database?