Will the January tournaments that have already been received be included in the April supplement? How bad is the backlog?
To be honest, I don’t know if all of the events received in January will be rated by the time we do the April cutoff, some time late next week.
I think as of yesterday they were on events received on January 22nd.
They’re getting a bit faster at it, and we’ve made some software changes that should help some too. We’re also getting ready to start training staff in Tennessee to do ratings, but I don’t know that we’ll get much productivity out of them ahead of the Supplement. I’ve got some ideas on that that I’ll be discussing with other people tomorrow.
If they are already working on events received January 22nd, how come there are events received prior to that but not rated yet?
For example, look at affiliate H6011862, the tournament received 02-04-2005 (GP#10) is already rated, but the tournament (GP#8 & GP#9) received on 01-14-2005 is not.
Mysteries abound. I can’t figure out why one of my tournaments (received online without errors on 24 December) had four of its sections rated on 11 January and the other two still not rated. I assume that it has something to do with them being unratable and that they will be rated as soon as possible, but in the meantime I’m left in the dark.
Alex Relyea
I, too, can’t figure out which tournaments get priority. The DC Junior Open ended 1/16 and was received 1/20: not rated yet. (Also waiting for Annual Virginia Open ended 1/30 received 2/4, but I guess you haven’t reached that date yet.) It just seems like it is taking longer,instead of shorter, to rate tournaments, even though updates are posted several times a day.
There are situations that can cause an event to be unratable even if it passes all of the validation checks in the online system. Most of these are temporary situations due to the startup process, but there are likely going to be a few ‘event sanity’ checks that will cause an event submitted online to be reviewed by the office before it is released for rating.
Under the old ratings system, sections that passed validation could be rated even if there were other sections in the event that had not yet passed validation. Sometimes it could take several rating runs for all sections to get rated, which caused a lot of confusion.
When we converted the data to the new system, there were 117 sections of events that had not yet been rated. 77 of them still have not passsed validation. Most of those were received in December, but one of them goes back to September. (I don’t know the specifics, I’m guessing there was an issue that the TD had to be contacted to resolve and he hasn’t responded back yet.)
Under the new system, we’re currently not letting an event be rated until every section passes validation.
Tthere are still about two dozen events that were placed on hold before the first rate on the new system that have not been released. Some of these are for programming issues (the new system doesn’t handle RR or matches yet, that’s scheduled to go in this weekend), others are for data issues, mostly duplicate IDs. I’m going to try to get as many of those cleaned up as possible this weekend
I’ve never understood why a RR would require special treatment. Isn’t it just like a Swiss, crosstablewise?
Alex Relyea
There was also a tournament that was received on January 24th and still hasnt been rated. But there was one rated on January 30th. I dont unserstand that.
On another note relating to the April supplement, usually the cutoff point for tournaments is the last day of the previous month (February 28 in this case). Now that tournaments submitted online can be rated same day, will some of the March tournaments be included in the ratings for people in the April supplement?
Thanks,
Chris
I think the policy of cutting off based on event-ending date at the end of the previous calendar month makes sense, even under the new ratings system, so I see no reason to recommend a change to that policy.
MSA doesn’t know whether an event was submitted online or mailed to the USCF, so just looking at the received date doesn’t tell the whole story. Also, we lost the received date for around 100 events due to conversion issues, so those will probably show as 00/00/0000.
Also, because of who is assigned to do events on paper and who is assigned to do events on diskette, we aren’t on the same ‘date received’ date for them.
I think there are times that some events that get processed out of date-received order, for a variety of reasons.