I thought you could only gain or lose 50 points in a match. Both players in the match had provisional ratings going into the match. Does the 50 point rule not apply if the players are provisional (the rating system document doesn’t state anything about this)?
Also, should matches like this even be allowed to be rated since it violates the rule “Both players involved must have an established published rating, with the difference in ratings not to exceed 400 points.”
While these players probably should not have been in a match, the match limits don’t make sense for provisionally rated players, because their ratings are not very reliable yet, especially since that player apparently only had 4 games.
I’ll pass this on to the developers to check on the validation code issue here.
Such events should probably not be rated, but over the years quite a few have been rated, either because they fell through the cracks or because the TD was able to convince staff that the event should be rated, so during the MUIR rewrite of the ratings programming it was decided that we would not enforce match rules upon players who do not have an established rating, since one of the reasons for the match rule limits is to keep established players from sandbagging. The alternative would be to delete those events, possibly years after they were held, which seems oppressive.
Here’s a hypothetical example, similar to an existing match that was found during the MUIR development discussions.
Suppose in a player’s first event the player goes 0-4 against 4 opponents, the lowest of whom is rated 1600. This player would have a 1200/4 rating.
Now let’s suppose this player plays a 4 game match, going 1-3, against a player rated 800 and that event gets into the ratings system somehow. If the match rule were strictly applied to this event, the player’s rating could only go down 50 points, to 1150, but clearly this player should have a rating well below that.
I believe the RC chair has been advised of that exception. There may be some reluctance to putting it in the formal ratings document since those events weren’t generally supposed to be ratable, and adding that exception might lead to more instances of rated matches that do not meet the match requirements, which, like many ratings-related regulations including the ratings formula itself, are under the control of the EB. But as long as they’re there, reasonable rules for handling them should exist, and the 50 point rule was not mathematically sound for provisionally rated players.
There was one scholastic tournament in the late 1980s. There were plenty of players for the K-3, 4-5 and 6-8 sections but the four-round HS section had only two players. I do not remember the rating difference but it may have required additional documentation to get that four-round Swiss with two players to be treated as an exception to the match restrictions.
I remember this being asked in the past. I believe the situation was a low turnout of 2 for a 3 round swiss with something like 1st & 2nd place prizes so players had full incentive to play despite a 400+ rating difference! I thought the conclusion was that since it was advertised as a 3 round swiss & they always drew 8-20 players for same event that it was an easy exception. So it was rated without any restrictions a swiss?? Maybe they had meant that it was just rateable, but had the lower player gained more than 50 maybe it would have been capped at 50??