Thanks for all your hard work… Can you tell me when you will rerate again?
We rerated yesterday, the updates are just now starting to percolate through the system. (The rerated started at around 10PM and finished at around 4:30 AM.)
Next on my list is cutting the April supplement records.
Thanks for accomplishing the rerate. Though i still can’t tell that my rating is correct. I went over 1900 for the first time 7/20/2004 and i was 1908 going in to the tournament on 1/30/05. I had no out of order rated tournaments before only that 15 point adjustment 6 points are still missing from the 7/20/04 event maybe before but that is the first place i am certain they are missing. USCF ID 12590577
2005-03-06
200503063801 SCC TORNADO CLASSIC
1: OPEN 1926 =>
1917
2005-02-21
200502211681 OCF WINTER NAO FIDE OPEN
1: OPEN 1902 =>
1926
2005-01-30
200501307391 SCC SW REGIONAL
1: SCCSWREG 1899 =>
1902
2004-10-10
200410104530 OKLAHOMA QUADS
1: PRIMARY 1895 =>
1899
2004-09-06
200409067610 OCF NAO FIDE OPEN
1: SECTION1 1896 =>
1895
2004-07-20
200407205670 HOT SUMMER NIGHTS
1: HOT 1883 =>
1896
Mike,
It looks like a player in one of my events whom had returned to tournament chess after a long absense had his Quick rating reset rather than using his Regular rating as a base.
Event: 200406238700 (Quick only)
Player: 12510025
His Pre/Post is listed as:
1641P0 → 887P4
I know that his Regular rating was used as a base the first time this event was rated (8/04 Published Quick: 1537).
Thanks,
Jeff
12448994
Jeff, it looks like the only thing that’s off is the provisional game count,
which should have been started at 10.
I’m guessing that’s because he had an OLD established rating and there
wasn’t a game count associated with it. (It should default to 26 when that’s the case, it probably does so AFTER the point at which it seeds the quick ratings. I’ll check the program when I get done with the April supplement.)
I don’t think this would have affected anyone’s post-event rating, and I may be able to fix it by just updating the provisional game count for this player rather than with a rerate.
Mike,
Thanks for the update.
He also played in Quick event 200501122311 where his rating was the 1537 for Pre-rating versus 887 now. So, his rating probably did have an effect on this event.
It’s these nuisance problem reports which give a programmer gray hair, but which are also extremely useful in tracking down bugs in the system!
Bill Smythe
Mike,
Great job! My numbers have jumped around but they are no longer provisional and the same for some of the other players in my club.
I know it’s a lot of hard work and I appreciate what you are doing.
Steve
It turns out there were two or three programming errors, basically all initialization issues, so I’m rerunning the big rerate again. 
We still had some manual adjustment records out there for you. Gone now.
I’m sorely tempted to just delete them all, since they’re not always identified as to why they were created in the first place. Unfortunately, some of them ARE necessary.
I never consider bug reports a nuisance, though some of the reporters can become one. People who DEMAND ACTION NOW, for example.
For most chessplayers, ratings are a way of measuring progress, not a matter of life and death.
At this point, I’ve basically deleted all the manual adjustments made in 2004, that may cause some problems with ones that shouldn’t have been deleted, but I know Nancy made MANY manual changes because of duplicated events that we now have a much better way of correcting.
I think that regular readers of this forum can name at least one player for whom ratings are a matter of life and death 
.
On another note, the rerate doesn’t seem to have restored the tournaments for which I was an assistant TD to my TD history. One of my assistants who is itching to take the test for local is alarmed by the fact that his history shows him lacking the necessary experience. I told him that you guys had records that you could check on that, but I’d like to see this corrected at some point.
Let me emphasize that it is no big deal, just something that would be nice.
Alex Relyea
I checked the tournaments affected by the returning player and everything looks good. Sorry about the need for a re-rate. Thanks for your hard work.
USCF’s tournament director activity records have always been less than complete, in part because of reporting issues and in part because the fields we’ve had for this purpose have changed several times, as has the TDCC’s way of classifying experience requirements.
TDs are both expected and advised to keep their own log of their TD activity for the purpose of advancing to higher levels of certification.
I have to do a reload of the assistant TD fields in the new USCF internal crosstable database from the old files in order to fix the assistant TD fields. I doubt I will have time for that in the next week, depending on whether or not we’ve got any more major ratings problems to fix first. (We’ll be tracking down individual corrections for quite some time, I fear, but that’s always been the case.)
As far as I know, newly rated events have the correct data, it’s just the historical data that needs to be corrected.
Mike,
There were some manual adjustments made for some of my tournaments that have been removed in the most recent rerate run. Namely that I played in two Quick rated tournaments in January and February of 2004. Unfortunately, they were rolled into my regular rating but they eventually got corrected (not sure exactly when). It looked like the first rerate run on Sunday handled them correctly but the second one again included them in my regular rating.
It’s a difference of between 10 and 15 points. At this point, I am considering it “water over the dam”. However, I did mention to Larry King that I don’t intend to play in any more Quick rated tournaments.
Regards.
Steve
My rating on the General Card says that my rating is 1551, but when you look up my Tournament History, it says that my rating should be 1564! When the April supplement comes out, will my rating be 1551 or 1564?
My USCF ID is 12809073.
-Josh
The ratings on the general card will not be updated until the April supplement is finalized. (That’s taking several days longer than planned because of data issues.)
Your rating for the April supplement will be the one from the last event that ended on or before February 28th, 2005 when we finalize the cutoff.
That may not be your most recent event, which is what the ‘unofficial’ rating on the general card currently shows, and after a few days it may not even be your last event from before February 28th if you have competed in other events that aren’t rated in time to make the supplement. (That’s always been the case. We’re still getting a lot of events from January.)
Your OFFICIAL PUBLISHED RATING from the February supplement is still what TDs should be using unless they have announced otherwise in all pre-tournament publicity. That’s your rating for tournament play until April 1st.
There has been a lot of confusion over whether the unofficial rating shown on the general card is the ‘latest’ one. Because of timing issues, it may not correspond exactly with the crosstable records, and because of sequencing issues it may not correspond with your most recent event, either.
It has even been suggested that we remove the unofficial rating information from the general card, and make sure that your current published rating always shows there. (As it stands, once the April supplement ratings are posted to the member record, that card no longer shows someone’s CURRENT published rating, it shows what it will be on April 1st.)
Keeping it up-to-date is also very time-consuming, since that information can change several times a day and it takes over an hour to update member records from the crosstable records.
There are a number of events which are listied as "Received Online, Rated " on the “Tournaments Received Search Results” page, which do not appear in either the “Tournaments Rated Search Results Page” or in the affiliate’s “MSA Affiliate Tournament History page.”
For example:
NEW YORK MARCH OPEN! NEW YORK NY 2005-03-13 2005-03-13 A6004530 10125391 Received Online, Rated
Thank you.
Lou Caruana
Those events should be available online now.
I’ve run into some problems displaying some events from the past (ones that have not been rerated), I’m not sure what’s causing them, it may just be corrupted data.
I need to reload the entire crosstable history anyway in order to add a few fields and to correct the problem with assistant TD records, but that’s too big a job to try to do in one block (it would be well over 2 gibabytes of data and would tie up the MSA server for perhaps as long as 24 hours), so I’m going to be reloading it one year at a time over the next two weeks.
On a technical note, at some point we are going to switch what database engine drives MSA (going from MySQL to PostgreSQL), but that probably won’t happen until late April and we’ll try to make the switch as unobtrusively as we can.