Someone called me and asked me to look into this event. They asked me if a clock simul was a rateable event. I told them that I’ve never heard of one that was rated and that playing multiple boards at once was against the rulebook. But I am also aware that you can announce rules in advance that aren’t in the rulebook either. If the IM is not upset about losing the rating points, then I don’t imagine anyone can really complain about this. I told them I’d post the question and see what the official answer is.
While we are pretty much at the mercy of the TD to submit only events that comply with USCF rules, why shouldn’t a simul be ratable, assuming there was some way to deal with time control requirements?
We don’t restrict players from playing in more than one section of an event at the same time, and because of things like merged schedules and re-entries, we can’t really restrict players from having more than one pairing # in a section, either.
Rated simul! Sounds like the most effective sand-bagging technique possible. Lose hundreds of rating points in a single evening. Now do you have any dieting tips?
It’s harder than you think to lose hundreds of points in a single event, even one with many games like a rated simul, because the K factor lowers as you increase the number of games played.
If I look at players with established regular ratings of 1200 or higher in events since 2005, the largest point loss I can find is 457 points.
In that time period there are some 475,000 performances by players with an established pre-event rating of 1200 or higher, and only 257 of them resulted in losing 100 or more points, with just five of those being 200 or more points. For purposes of comparison, 6113 of those performances resulted in a gain of 100 or more points (158 with 200+ point gains), with the largest of those being 422 points.
Bonus points and floors are two of the factors explaining why there are so many more 100+ point gains than 100+ losses.
I have always felt that 20D disallows a player to play a game (tournament or otherwise) while a tournament game was in progress. Playing over, even watching another like-game, would offer an unfair advantage.
20D. Use of additional chessboard or computer prohibited.
A player who analyzes a game in progress on another chessboard or consults a computer about the position is guilty of a serious violation of the rules. Though the director still has discretion, the usual penalty is loss of the game. See also 1C2, Director discretion; 21K, Use of director’s power; and 36H, Consultation.
Not to mention there are events where there are side events going on at the same time as a main event.
Depends, but I doubt it. I know this IM doesn’t speak very good English either unless that’s changed in the past year (which could be possible). I wonder if he understood that it would be rated. Has anyone checked with him to see if he knew it was rated?
For several years, in our team tournament of 4 boards we had a player who volunteered to play a complete match himself (in order to have an even number of teams and avoid byes). The time control was 30/90, SD/60 and he didn’t appear to have any time pressure problems. Overall his performance was consistent with his rating - with a lower performance rating on the top 2 boards and a higher performance rating on the bottom 2.
Invoking 20D for this is a real stretch. Interpreted in the extreme, players shouldn’t be allowed to look at any other games, including the boards to their right and left.
For organizers really concerned about this, don’t allow players to enter multiple sections of your events or have side events going on at the same time as main event rounds.
Unless the submitting TD and the person giving the simul are the same person (which raises other issues), presumably by submitting the event the TD is not considering that as something covered by 20D.
It is a very strange crosstable, though. Has anyone else seen an event in which most of the players took unplayed games every round? I can understand it when one player plays all of the other players simultaneously (or sequentially, for that matter), but why list several other players who didn’t play at all?
On a side note, I actually had a player like that for my tournament this weekend. I intended to use her as a house player, but then something came up so it wasn’t necessary. Is there any way when you’re uploading tournaments to take out players that didn’t play?
A while back we did some testing of events, there are quite a few events in which the average player is unpaired in 25% or more of the rounds.
You’d have to ask the TD what was going on, the crosstable doesn’t give a complete enough picture.
A few of them appeared to be ways to get around the match rule restrictions (eg, player 1 and 2 player 10 games against each other, and 1 game each against players 3 and 4, who do not play each other), but I haven’t seen enough recent examples of that to be overly concerned about it.
For starters, this would make display boards in the playing hall problematic.
Using another board (or a computer) is barred ONLY if the primary purpose is to analyze the
current game in progress. If the primary purpose is to play a completely different game, or to
watch someone else’s game, then the rule does not apply.
PERHAPS there is a gray area where a player should avoid watching a similar game.
PERHAPS there is a problem if the player is playing similar games on the two boards.
but, usually not. The rule is intended to prohibit actively using another set to analyze a tournament game in progress. I don’t think this prevents someone from playing 2 (or 10, or 100) games simultaneously.
My first test would be: are the two games of equal importance? I would not allow a player to play a game in the tournament and simultaneously play skittles against a friend. Here, it’s clear that one of the games is the important one, and the other is being played (perhaps) for the purposes of analysis. Even if that’s not the intent, I see no harm in instructing the player to “not do that”.
I didn’t take time to check this hypothesis, but I would guess the TD may have just entered the thirty players in one section and then copied that file to make the other sections (if using SwissSys) or copied all the players in the section and pasted them into the other sections (if using WinTD). I agree that the result looks unconventional.
I don’t know about SwissSys but, at the end of the tournament when using WinTD, you can highlight every player in the section and drag&drop them to a non-rated section called withdraw. It will only pull the players that don’t have any pairings, leaving behind just those paired against an opponent (possibly including players who forfeited the first round and were withdrawn - there are other steps available to clean those up).
So how many points would a 2000 player lose if he faced 50 players averaging 1400, and gave up 5 draws and 5 losses? Calculating in my head, I think it would be about 200.
Not possible you say? How about a 2600 Bobby Fischer facing average 1800 (a plausible guess) players, scoring +48=5-4 at Milwaukee on 5/14/1964. Not his best simul but not his worst either.
Statistics from tournaments are not be a good predictor. In swiss tournaments, as you lose games you face others who are also losing and [tend to] reach equilibrium. Plus the ratings are closer in a tournament so the points for losing are less.
In Swiss-Sys when you withdraw a player who has no played games it will ask you if you want to delete him from the roster. If you have several players like this you can click “Yes to all” and that will remove all withdrawn players with no games. It cleans up the wall chart quite nicely. It’s also useful if you’re posting an html file of the wall chart or standings on a website. I’ve had parents ask “Why is my kid on the wall chart? He didn’t play.”
Unfortunately, that’s not always true. I can’t figure out when SwissSys will allow you to remove a player with no played games from the roster and when it won’t. Anyway, my original question was whether there was a way to do that from the USCF upload page.
No, there is no way to remove a player from an event after it has been uploaded. You can change the ID to 25000000, providing there are no ratable games for that ID.
Since a tournament can be set up pretty much any way that the organizer wants, as long as the participants actually show up, I don’t think that there is any reason to make it be considered matches. I know that when Robert Feldstein (sp?) was on his tour to play in every county, he would play one player several times, and he would be the only one on the other side, but I don’t think they were matches either.
