Mike,
Will the cut-off date for the August 1 supplement be June 30 or some other date?
Jon
I don’t know yet, we’re still discussing it. We’re leaning in the direction of waiting until July 7th to do the cutoff so that tournaments held over the Fouth of July holiday period have a chance to be included in the August Supplement.
However, the final decision is largely an editorial one, because one of the reasons for having a cutoff in the first place is so that the office has time to prepare the supplement and get that information to TDs in time for tournaments that begin on August 1st. The later we set the cutoff, the harder that task gets. (One person has even suggested that we wait until after July 11th to do the cutoff, since there are a couple of international events that will conclude on the 11th.)
Complicating this is that the August Supplement may play a pivotal role in the determination of the participants in the next US Championship, so including the results from events such as the World Open, which ends on July 4th, and the other international events alluded to above could impact who is invited to participate in that event.
We haven’t been doing a very good job of getting the printed supplement out in a timely fashion lately. I didn’t get my copy of the June supplement until Monday, June 12th, and I know other TDs who got theirs around that time, too.
I don’t know the reasons for the delay, part of it may be that mail delivery is slower than it used to be. (That appears to be affecting the delivery times for Chess Life, too, despite several recent measures to try to improve delivery times for the magazine.)
The cutoff date for the August Supplement has been set. It will include all events rated by 11PM on Friday, July 7th.
Because of staffing issues, any events with class prize ratings floors should be rated and the class prize list received by 10AM on Thursday, July 6th, in order to ensure that the office has time to review those events and set any class prize floors.
I’m just curious about the class prize floors. Whose job is it to monitor those? What happens if the floors are not applied consistently? As I understand it, the minimum prize money for a class prize floor used to be $1000 ($2000 for 2200). I am aware that these floors have been doubled recently (is this official yet?).
I ask because I am aware of several players who, in my opinion, should have gotten floors. For example, two won more than $2000 in an expert section (one won about $5000). Neither has a 2200 floor, although the $5000 one got a CCA minimum. The other player has never been rated over 2200 and still plays expert sections. In another example, one of my own students won over $1500 in the B section of another tournament about a year ago. His current rating is 1900+ but his official floor still stands at 1700.
The tournaments that I reference above are CCA events or USCF national events. I would have assumed that Bill Goichberg, Walter Brown, Carol Jarecki, Tim Just and others have a direct line of communication to the USCF office on such matters.
Michael Aigner
Is there even a floor at 2200? I thought the highest floor was 2100.
Are floors listed on MSA just the 200-point type, or are class-money floors also listed?
Bill Smythe
Money floors are also listed. That’s what mine is.
Alex Relyea
All floors are listed on MSA, regardless of why the floor is in place.
There are four types of floors:
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Peak ratings based floors. These range from 1400 to 2100 and are earned when someone’s rating goes over a 100 point boundary. For example, a player who has had a peak rating of 2100 through 2199 will have a 1900 floor. We’re still working out some kinks with these types of floors and rerated events. (At one time I think peak rating floors went all the way up to 2200, but that was lowered to 2100, probably around 1997.)
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Class prize floors. These are floors earned as a result of earning $2000 (recently raised from $1000) or more as a class prize or in a section restricted to players rated under 2000 or lower. The class prize floor is set at whatever rating (up to 2000) would have kept the player from entering that event or winning that class prize. For example, winning $2000 in an Under 1800 event would result in a class prize floor of 1800. I don’t know of a recent instance of it, but I think earning $2000 in an under 1850 event (for example) would result in a class prize floor of 1900. I think the upper limit for imposing class prize floors used to be higher, possibly as high as 2400, but it was lowered to 2000 several years ago.
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Original Life Master floors: Original Life Masters (someone who has played 300 or more games in events where the player has a rating of 2200 or higher at the beginning of the event) have a floor of 2200.
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Manually imposed floors: The USCF Office can place a floor or ceiling on a player if in the office’s opinion the player’s tournament history warrants it. This floor could be higher or lower than the player’s previous floor, if any. (We currently don’t have a mechanism for imposing a rating ceiling, but historically this has been done a few times, and this is on the wish list for the next set of revisions to the ratings programming.)
Players who are at their floor may request that their floor be lowered. We usually get about a dozen such requests a month, around half of them result in the player’s floor being lowered.
In February the EB passed a rule requiring that players who are at their floor and play in a rated match will have their tournament history reviewed to see if their floor should be lowered. So far, I don’t believe any floors have been lowered as a result of this new policy.
I’m told that at one point IMs and GMs also got floors of 2200, but there are currently no rules in effect regarding floors for titled players, though there has been some discussion of having some rule regarding titled players and floors.
Aha, there is no money floor for 2200 anymore. I know there used to be one because that’s how I was explained it in the late 1990s when I was an expert myself. So the only real “money floor” for 2200 would be a CCA minimum.
Interesting. That answers one of my biggest USCF related questions. Thanks!
Michael Aigner
As you may conclude from the above, there have been a number of changes made in the USCF’s ratings floor policies over the years. At one point the peak rating floor was not anchored to a 100 point boundary so a 1750 peak rating got you a 1550 floor. For a while there was a 100 point interval, so a 1750 rating got you a 1600 floor instead of 1500, however both of those policies were thought to be a bit too inflationary.
These changes were not retroactive, and in some cases I think they even managed to lose some data in the process of converting from one policy to another.