I had a player this weekend playing in his first tournament in fifty years. Does anyone have rating supplements from the late 1960s to help me track down his old rating? Thank you.
Alex Relyea
The office has a set, you could email Susan. I’m still hoping that the project to scan the old supplements will get funded along with the project to scan the Chess Life issues that weren’t on the CD set put out a few years ago.
If it is from the 60’s the best source might be the microfilmed ratings cards in Crossville.
I do not have supplements, but I have annual rating lists. Did they even start using supplements in the 1960’s?
Back in the 1960’s, IIRC, they did only annual lists which were published in the magazine. In the early 1970’s, the USCF started to publish ratings semiannually. When they started doing it quarterly, the supplements appeared. That evolved into bi-monthly publishing of rating, which players back then thought was lightning fast. Today, some players expect to see their new rating before the event is over, based on seeing pre- and post- round ratings that some TDs post with the wallcharts they print out.
Hey Bruce, check out where the Pittsburgh CC puts all of the old supplements. There should be one or more 5 year supplements in the batch. One of the nice things in the supplements were rules changes, TD tips, lists of suspended players and TDs, and top lists for adults and juniors. As a player and as a TD, I would peruse the supplements for interesting data.
I was talking about my personal collection of old Chess Life’s, but the Pittsburgh CC has old Chess Life’s, too. I haven’t seen supplements in their collection, though. (I don’t have supplements myself, either.)
Wow. Seriously, a case like this makes me wonder about the universal applicability of “once rated, always rated.” Still, I would leave it to a member of the ratings committee to say whether there is more value in using a fifty year old rating as a pre-event indicator of strength instead of 1300 (the initial estimate for anyone at least 26 years of age in the complete absence of any other information).
I’m not on the ratings committee, but I’ve looked at a number of returning players with old ratings > 1300 and while there’s usually some initial drop, for the most part if someone was a fairly strong player (perhaps A player or higher) their strength is still at least B player when they return and they quickly get back to form.
Age might factor into it if the player is now well past 50, but it doesn’t appear that active players lose strength as they get older as much as some have surmised they do.
That’s encouraging!
When were rating even instituted?
The first USCF list came out in 1950. According to Wikipedia, the Correspondence Chess League of America (CCLA) came out with the first rating system, in 1939. The first national rating system may have been the Ingo system used in West Germany starting in 1948.
US Chess first started a ratings system in 1950 with the Harkness system, switching to the more mathematically based Elo system in 1960, after a year or more of work by Arpad Elo, a professor of physics at Marquette University.
Elo’s book, The Ratings of ChessPlayers, Past & Present, goes into both the mathematics and the early history of ratings.
The ratings were computed at the US Chess office using desk calculators until the first computer was installed in about 1977. That computer was programmed in COBOL. In around 2000 the formulas were extensively revised by the ratings committee and the programming was rewritten in dBase/Clipper. In 2004 it was rewritten again to use a relational database server (PostgreSQL) with most of the programming written in PHP.
For those of you too new to know, many of those passive-voice actions were largely handled by none other than Mike Nolan, the author of the previous post, and U.S. Chess owes him a huge debt of gratitude.
Bill Smythe
I did the 2004 rewrite, including coming up with the concept of rerating and implementing online submission of events (over 95% of events are submitted online, most within 36 hours of when the event ends), other people wrote the two previous versions. I believe Tom Doan wrote a fair amount of the Clipper code, notably the revised mathematical functions.
See what I mean?
Bill Smythe
It was in Clipper before I got to it. (The (in)famous TNMTADMT program was also written in Clipper). I rewrote (and completely reworked) the Clipper code to be more efficient and to use the new formulas.
The dBase/Clipper version probably dates back to late 1991, since that’s also how far back our detailed tournament history goes. That was also the heyday for dBase and Clipper.