Looking through the TD/Affiliate area it has an option to order a Crosstable for my event. I did it, and nothing happened, never got an email or anything. That said, isn’t a crosstable just a chart? Can’t TD software do that or hand draw it? Why would anyone need to order one in that section of the site?
You don’t need to order one, particularly if you used pairing software as the software will produce one as you noted. If you did it and submitted it by hand then you might want to order a printed copy form the USCF to have one for your file.
We rarely have requests for cross tables these days, but a few still ask for them.
I’ve never ordered one in the 10 years I’ve been directing.
I don’t see any tournament you’ve directed on MSA, so I don’t know what event you are referring to. That said, this was a very popular option before MSA, as USCF mailed a crosstable with all the ratings changes. Now that MSA does most of the same thing, it is considerably less popular.
Alex Relyea
Hi Alex, I’m running one within a month and am totally new to the experience of TD. It’s worded “Order a crosstable for your event”. I didn’t realize what it meant and that it was so outdated and wasn’t sure if I needed one from the USCF.
The “ordering” of a cross table would be a post event item. You would be requesting a paper copy of the cross table for the event. Currently with the MSA you can look up cross tables for events after they have been rated. The only reason possibly for ordering a cross table would be to have a printed copy for your records. It use to be the cross table was important for a couple of reasons. One reason was to have it as a record for TD qualifications. Another reason was to double check to see that everything was submitted correctly and processed correctly. I mention the second due to something that occurred many years ago. I had a player play in a club event after an extremely long absence from chess. They of course had to rejoin the USCF. The thing was that I had old paper supplements going back over 10 years and so was able to find his old USCF ID and old rating. However, when I received back the cross table it had the gentleman as an unrated with a new USCF ID. I sent back to let the USCF know that this was not a new unrated player. What was done was that his old rating was used a sort of a provisional rating and the old rating was some how averaged in with his performance in the event for a new provisional rating. It still was not near his old rating, but at least it was reasonably close to it. This would not have been true of his rating if treated as an unrated. I understand this was a fluke in the system at the time.
Who knows 30 years from now you may want to have the record of the tournament. Also, you could always post the official USCF cross table [with pre and post ratings] at your club.
Larry S. Cohen
You want a crosstable? Print one by copying the tournament from the MSA record of one of the players or from the record of the affiliate. We print these all of the time that way and put a hard copy of the recorded tournament with a flyer of that tournament in a sheet protector. That is then put in a binder to keep a history of the club for the players to look at. Helps with planning for future events, too. We certainly would not pay for one, even though there is still a box you can check requesting one.
There are two ways to order a crosstable, and it’s not clear which one you are referring to.
One is to pay a small amount ($2) for a printed crosstable, which will be mailed to you after the event is rated. This option is essentially a holdover from the days when most tournaments were sent to the USCF by mail and we had no website to display crosstables from rated events, but we still get a few orders for printed crosstables every week.
The other is to order one using the TD/Affiliate Support area. You can either get a list of events you directed or a list of events ending on a given date and then select an event from that list. The crosstable will be emailed to you using the email address in your USCF member record. There is no charge for this service.
You could also print one out from the MSA crosstable display, but I find that wastes a lot of paper and doesn’t always come out looking very well.