What's your conclusion?

Running Chess Tournaments
1

Unrated player(USCF ID 12888672)

after 6 games is 1918 USCF beating an Expert and a 2347 (Master J Shahade).

Next tourney(OCT 2004) he loses to kid players rated 182, 586, 553 and 255! to drop his rating all the way down from 1918 to 739!

Next tournament(3 months later)he wins the tournament beating FM John Curdo along the way. Next tourney comes in clear 2nd though he actually beat the overall tourney winner. Lastly he comes in clear first in the Foxwoods tournament under 2000 section. This all within 5 months of him losing to players rated 182, 586, 553, and 255??

What are your thoughts, or the story if you know it? Please consider also that he has won 2 under 2000 tournaments winning money ruining others chances to win. This when he would have been 2083 after his second good result and 2118 going in to the Foxwoods tournament if not for those 4 losses to kids(he did manage somehow to beat a 286! in that kid tourney though:)! ) He shouldn’t have even been in the under 2000 much less win thousands of dollars. Unless the kid result is real… hmmm. Ideas, thoughts info please?

Thank you

I’m very curious!

2

This is phenomenal! Sandbagging is one thing, but this person apparently competed in the Pan Am Intercollegiate (which suggests that he is not a scholastic player) and then in the middle school section of a scholatic event??

If my assumption that this player is not in middle school is true, what does this say about the TD of the scholastic event?

3

I don’t have personal knowledge of the situation, but one thing to note is that even without the kid’s tournament he would have been eligible for the sections that he entered because the 1918/6 rating would still have been his official rating. In fact he didn’t try to use the lower rating to enter a lower section at Foxwoods. So he was eligible for the under 2000 section.

The likeliest explanation is that the td for the kid’s tournament looked up an id number for a new player with the same name or typed in the wrong id. I don’t see anybody else with the same name so it is likely to be the wrong id. In particular, the ids around his (70,71,73,74,75,76) are for low-rated TX players - so it probably was one of them. The difference in age (middle school vs intercollegiate) and result would seem to make that likely. Today, if submitted on-line the new system would have generated a warning to the td that they probably had the wrong id number.

It seems to me that he did nothing wrong and in fact entered the correct section (as if the kid’s result didn’t happen). Of course in the future the April rating should have been over 2000 and so he shouldn’t enter an u2000 section.

4

Perhaps(but any TD, having knowledge of the kid result would most likely not let him play in the section)Also, if you remove the result from losses to kids going into the liberty bell open he would have been 2083, and going in to foxwoods he would have been 2118. Further, because of this bogus rating all the people that he has beaten have lost more points than they should have.

5

I wonder what all the precautions are that the USCF takes against sandbagging and repeat sandbagging.

The floors and the lists the big organizers compile are a way to prevent repeats, but since there is no real way to prevent someone signing up under a different name, say slight misspelling, add/take away middle initial, nickname, short name, switch order, etc. I think we are screwed.

I know Nolan has some routines to find out duplicates, but they probably mostly catch honest mistakes, not future felons trying to be deceitful.

One way would be to register SSN and passport for anyone winning over a certain amount. There is a tax reporting requirement in any case, so there should be no problem identifying big winners. They could though, in case of foreign nationals, present a passport one time, a SSN the next.

This kind of stuff is what really spoils those big tournaments. Otherwise, they are great fun.

I guess TDs could check the histories of players, but this is not practical for the bigger events. Maybe automated warnings if the history is wacky? I know that the way the data is set up may not make this easy (from another recent thread about player history against opponents).

Again, taking from yet another recent thread, if you have a bad design for prizes, you will get into bad situations. Having a separate Unrated or Provisional prize for masters coming in from abroad or finally deciding to register as USCF members or coming back from a long hiatus a much stronger player could help, but someone with criminal intentions could still decide to play their first 25 games really badly.

It’s a really bad situation, I wonder what people (USCF, big tourney organizers) are doing about it, apart from the obvious preventive measures, which don’t really work against someone determined to break them.

The real way to make sure this doesn’t happen again: report the crimes to the police, send sandbaggers to jail for fraud. That way they can leave us alone and we can play real competitive chess and have fun.

6

According to USCF records, that player is 13, so having comped in a scholastic event is not out of the question, though that seems inconsistent with having played in the 2002 Pan Am.

I don’t see a Hugo Padilla on the latest FIDE list.

I wonder if we have two players with similar names here. The name seems familiar.

7

Hmm, I hadn’t thought about the explanation above. It could be an honest mistake by the TD involved, but I’m sure the player himself had reviewed his history before entering Foxwoods. If he didn’t alert the USCF and the organizer about the mess up, I would think that still would be fraudulent.

8

I don’t know if it is really familiar or not. Searching the name on the net i found two foreign references to the name and chess

clubajedrezmagdalena.com/tor … as2004.htm

and pucp.edu.pe/servcom/deportes/ajed.htm

I’m not sure what conclusions to draw yet. Though I do know that a few people dropped up to 32 rating points that they shouldn’t have :slight_smile:, which resulted in countless others gaining or losing a point or 2 that they shouldn’t have. Also if indeed it is the same person mentioned in the links above, then they had a rating to start with and perhaps should have been assigned a rating.

9

It appears there was an ID error in that October tournament in Texas.

I’ve assigned a new ID and changed the October event to use that ID. (That’ll take some time to get fully reflected in the ratings history and on MSA, after the next rerate, whenever it is, probably not until after SuperNationals III.)

That will also correct the ratings of the players in those other events who played either Hugo.

However, since the two tournaments just ahead of Foxwoods were in 2005, they wouldn’t have made the February ratings list anyway, so even if there had not been an ID error in October Hugo would have still had a published rating under 2000 for Foxwoods.

Hugo will have a floor of 2000 after his Foxwoods results, though that’s likely to be somewhat academic because I estimate his current rating after Foxwoods at about 2177.

10

I guess legit then, but unethical. He probably did know his history was messed up and didn’t do anything about it before entering the tournaments.

One, it lowers the expectations of opponents and catches them offguard.

Two, messes up the opponents’ ratings unfairly. I’m glad we can fix this.

However, it will not be legit if he did have a foreign rating (seems he may have) and did not report it to the organizers.

11

It isn’t clear to me whether the Hugo Padilla on the January FIDE list is the same player as the one who played at Foxwoods.

The January FIDE list has a different birthdate than the one we have for ID 1288672.

I also don’t know why there is no Hugo Padilla listed in the latest list from FIDE. (But I’m not the USCF’s FIDE specialist.)

Therefore, since it isn’t confirmed that this person has a FIDE rating, and even without the error his published rating for Foxwoods would have been under 2000, I would suggest it is a bit premature to conclude that anyone has acted unethically here.

Hugo did NOT win enough at the Liberty Bell in January to have to be reported to the USCF (ie, a class prize of $1000 or more.)

Also, the USCF’s ‘once-rated, always-rated’ policy is inconsistent with changing someone’s rating based on external information such as a FIDE rating.

Fixing problems like this is why the USCF has a full-time ‘ratings specialist’ on the staff. Hopefully the new ratings sytem will catch errors like the one that occurred in October. (It would likely have tripped the performance rating check.)

12

I’m not suggesting that the FIDE rating is his. The web links above suggest that he may have at least a Peruvian national rating. The web link talks about Peruvian team performaces at the panam. That’s why I said he MAY have a foreign rating.

I think the requirement for some tournaments is to report the highest rating, whether it be FIDE, USCF, or other national rating.

13

I don’t know of any such USCF rule. If an UNRATED player has a FIDE or Canadian rating, it should be used to seed his initial USCF rating, but once he has a USCF rating there is no formal procedure in place to revise his USCF rating based on a foreign rating, nor are TDs required to report it.

Perhaps there should be such a rule, but that’s a different issue.

This is a problem mostly with foreign players visiting the US to play in tournaments. Recently, for example, we were alerted to a 16 year old GM from Cosa Rica who had a USCF rating of 1850 from 1998.

It was patently unfair for his opponents to be penalized because his rating in our records was so out of line with his current strength, so an adjustment was made. I don’t know if Walter has heard back from the Ratings committee on this, it would be useful if they could offer some guidelines for when we should make out-of-band adjustments like this.

14

It’s not a USCF rule. It’s a published Continental Chess Association rule.

chesstour.com/rules.htm

See rule 34.

15

I doubt that most tds wouldn’t let him enter the U2000 section since that would have been his proper section if the scholastic tournament didn’t exist. Now if he had tried to enter some lower section based upon those games, then that would be different.

You seem to be ignoring how published ratings work. If the scholastic tournament did not exist, then he would have had a published rating of 1918/6 going into both the Liberty Bell Open and Foxwoods. So, U2000 sections would be appropriate. The ratings you quote would not be published until the April or June supplements.

You shouldn’t automatically blame the player. It’s likely that it was either a mistake by the td in Texas or at the Pan-Am - either a typo or finding an id for what was really a new player with the same name. These types of mistakes are not that uncommon and can be very hard to get fixed. So far, he has been entering the correct section of U2000 when he could have tried to enter lower sections based on that scholastic result. The fact that he didn’t seems to be greatly in his favor.

So the ratings mistake was in all likelihood not his fault and he didn’t try to take advantage of the lower rating. What more could you ask of someone.

16

What happened in October appears to be a mistake either by the organizer or the USCF staff, and mistakes will happen. At least the new programming allows us to make retroactive changes like this.

That event was rated under the old system. I think the new ratings system would have raised a warning on this player in October, it did so when Hugo played in the Liberty Bell because his rating at the time was way below his performance rating.

I’ve seen a few TDs just override any warnings without checking to see if there was a problem with the player’s ID, and a few have complained about them, but they DO catch errors before events are rated, even if they do tend to raise a few false alerts, what statisticians call Type I errors.

However, the Liberty Bell was a CCA event too, and apparently Bill Goichberg didn’t think think that performance was enough to require Hugo to play as an expert at Foxwoods.

17

It also appears that they were aware of the problem. From:
foxwoodsopen.com/2000.htm

“Padilla was limited to $2000 due to having less than 10 games played as of Feb 2005 list.”

Hugo Padilla 12888672 1918 W72 W60 W3 D2 W11 W8 W10 6½ $2000.00

So CCA actually ignored the scholastic result and lower rating of 729/11 which was published in the Feb 2005 supplement, and instead used the older 1918/6 rating.

18

A friend of mine who played in the section emailed me today saying the winner was Peruvian. So it seems likely the same person.
3801284 Padilla, Hugo PER 2195 0 1981-05-14 M

His rating has also been over 2200.

Too bad Dmitry Schneider wasn’t there he could have probably pointed it out/confirmed as they played at the Pan Am in 2002.