Are you ready for the Leago Switchover?

Running Chess Tournaments
21

Tom Langland testing 10/08/25:

1. I validate an event over 10 days old. Everything validates, except I get a hard stop error:

  • Event/endDate Tournament Results should be submitted within a week, this event ended 10 days ago.

But in the old system, I don’t even get an error. Now what it looks like I am supposed to do it to continue to the submission page and then click on the new checkbox. OK. Shouldn’t this be included in the error message, otherwise I was about to just give up.

2. I understand that the participant coding is required (at least for JTP events), but in the old system the box would be in yellow, to quickly alert the TD that this field needs to be filled in. With it just blank and the small, inconspicuous little message error makes it easy to just skip on by it.

3. I select me as the Chief TD (#11236219). I get error:

“TD Safe Play training/refresher is not current (last expired 2026-09-20)”

Seems like expiration of 09/20/2026 should pass

4. Until I paid for an event, I could always go in and edit it. There are now points of no return where the event gets locked.

5. It does not look like I can pay for multiple tournaments at the same time. This was a feature of the old system.

6. In the new MSA site, I do see there is a drop down arrow to drill down. That only shows up when I hover over the player. Not intuitive, but at least I found it!

7. Event ID: 202507207852 does not show section name. I know you can see it via the … menu. There may only be ONE section for the event, but it still should list the section name consistently like it would for multiple section events.

8. When in an event, the drill down on a player only shows the rating change in Q (quick) even though the event was DUAL rated.

9. Chief Asst TD information is missing at the top and other TD information should be listed as well. TD information for sections missing.

10. Player search doesn’t allow filtering by state.

11. Player search doesn’t allow for changing the sort order

12. this page:
https://beta-ratings.uschess.org/player/14629492
lists my wife with a gender of M.

13. On the rating page for events, again, the black/white dots are a major distraction. The color played is the least significant piece of information on the screen. The Final Score, and final ratings are the most important thing people (parents) will be looking for, followed by the individual results of each game. The dots are simply a diversion from the more valuable data on the screen. In screen design nomenclature this is referred to as Gratuitous visual effects

22

Michael, I am a man, but I am listed as Female in the following page:

23

DrCheck, would you put up a link to the rating page for events you were referring to with the black and white dots? I would like to see what is intrusive about the dots.

24

Yup - that’s mine :slight_smile: . I’ll DM the other details - no need to clutter up here. I agree that this is a much needed upgrade, and it appears to have a bunch of much needed upgrades and usability features. Perhaps I was just a bit too tired when I messaged before, and I also am a bit of a luddite - but while the chess pieces on the main screen look nice… having error messages that don’t contain details or actionable information makes me a bit grumpy. I plan on playing with it more as I get time!

25

dots.
dots.942×499 73.6 KB

Gratuitous visual effects

26

I did find how you can filter your search:

filter
filter132×101 2.69 KB

use this secret button!

27

it looks like that have all the Gender coding reversed!

28

Leago says they’ve got a static image that will show up if your system doesn’t support high-end graphics, it is on alpha now, should be on beta at the next deployment. I don’t currently see that error on any of my systems so I can’t say for sure that it is working.

Right now it appears that Leago isn’t supporting version1 formatted files, which accounted for about 4% of uploads this year. I tried processing them with the current DBF module in PHP (which is what the current system is written in), it doesn’t handle version1 files, either, and doesn’t really offer any clues why. As I recall, I wrote my own DBF parsing code back in 2004 because I wasn’t comfortable using the PHP DBF tools that existed at that time and were already in non-supported mode at that time, and were replaced a year or two later.

Ken, your error is something they’ve fixed but it won’t show correctly on beta until the DB is refreshed. You show as M on alpha, which got the refresh today. SafePlay coding is also inaccurate.

I’ve been processing events from August and September today, all of them hit the 10 day limit. I think the current system displays an alert at 10 days but doesn’t do a hard stop until 6 months. That’s probably too long these days, 8% of events are submitted between 7 and 28 days after they end, the 10 days limit is OK as an alert but they need something like 4 weeks or even 3 months before it requires staff approval. 28 of 13942 events (0.2%) were submitted 60 or more days after they ended, 75 (0.54%) were submitted more than 5 weeks after they ended. For testing, I’d probably extend that to 6 months, but for production I think 5 weeks might be adequate.

I actually prefer showing the color rather than showing W or B, both of which have other meanings in a crosstable.

There are numerous tournament conversion errors on beta, that’s one reason why it needs a reload. For example, for Supernationals VIII it isn’t showing ratings at all.

29

. I understand that the participant coding is required (at least for JTP events), but in the old system the box would be in yellow, to quickly alert the TD that this field needs to be filled in. With it just blank and the small, inconspicuous little message error makes it easy to just skip on by it.

This is one of those ‘every choice is bad’ options. We really only need that field for tracking JTP K12 and JTP primary events but THE MOST FREQUENTLY asked question by media types is “How many adult events are held?”, to which my first question is usually “What do you consider an adult event?” (After all, we have 15 year old grandmasters.)

That field was added so that TDs can indicate what type of event they thought they were running, since we weren’t there and post-hoc analysis is flawed. (Is a quad that just happens to have 4 kids in it because they’re grouped by rating a youth event?)

If we let that field default to something, 99% of TDs will never look at it to change it. I’m not in charge of the project so I can’t say what will happen with that field. (I’m just the guy hoping US Chess has learned a few things from 20+ years with the current system, some days I despair about that.)

Leago has added a “women’s chess” flag, but I don’t know the criteria for that. (And that question has even more landmines in it than the adult/youth one does, as it depends on membership gender coding.)

30

Its probably as intutive as the current way of doing it, to click on the pairing number. I know people who have been using MSA for years who didn’t know about that one. BTW, I KNEW it was there and couldn’t find the darned thing the other day! And if we showed the arrow all the time, it would become part of the background clutter.

31

I agree - least important piece of info is almost like what you want for a monochrome warning.

A personal visual issue I have is not right aligning stacked numbers. e.g. ratings. Does it do it for the results? (I am on my old hardware so I can’t look at the site)

Are the opponents linked to go to the player in the cross tab? Actually I always thought the way the xtab should work is if you click on a line it collapses / filters to just that player and their opponents (parent-children type view)

32

Ratings and the drill-down arrow only show on rated events outside of the TD portal, neither show in the TD portal. (That bugs me, too.)

Getting right-justified ratings fields that align down the crosstable should be possible in CSS, that might have to be a post-launch improvement.

33

What is Leago? The only web presence I can find for Leago is for GO software.

1 Like
34

Yup, that’s the company. They got their start doing event management and ratings software for Go events, but it turns out Go tournaments and chess tournaments have a lot in common (2 players, ELO-style ratings, etc), and that has meant we haven’t had to spend as much time explaining to them what tournaments are. They also understand that the majority of our events occur between 5PM Friday and 10PM Sunday.

1 Like
35

That might work OK for a small event, but I think the current drilldown will be better for larger ones.

36

Thanks for the information about this.

1 Like
37

Michael, I am using an android cell phone and the Leago Leader board and The Top 100 boxes have no name data. After selecting each category box by touching the 2 boxes, no data pops up in a list either. Lastly, in order to get the non portal window to scroll sometimes on this phone, I have to touch inside the box to enter membership data. Touching outside the box and moving the complete screen doesn’t work sometimes.

38

I don’t think they’re all populated yet, what you’re seeing is basically placeholder data. I’m not even sure what the leaderboard data is supposed to look like, I don’t know if it’s intended to be used like the one I wrote several years ago. Top 100 historical data is still being transferred, it exists in about 4 different data structures so they have to standardize it.

II haven’t looked at it on a cell phone much, but what I have noticed is that the data looks kind of clunky on a small screen device, which is often the case for data designed for a full sized screen. Responsive scaling can only go so far. But probably better than MSA, which was designed several years before smartphones were a thing. Tweaking it so it is easier to use on small screen devices will probably be a post-launch activity.

39

Maybe the color can change in the ratings estimator. Decreases are in red and clear but increases are in a green that is hard to see.

image

40

Yeah, For sure in this case you want the drill down since it can reformat, add more detail, and easy to contain as there are a limited number of opponents, but I was talking strictly about the xtab view.
Especially when I have a large section to hide the rows I do not care about … if I select a player the xtab becomes just his row + the rows of his opponents (technically it is just a calculated filter and could be extended to anything ala a spreadsheet although most of those filters are more useful when running a large section, not after it is done – off hand I am unaware of any pairing software that can filter the views although I ave used the swiss-sys show all sections quite a bit in the past)