February supplement files are now posted on MUIR and February supplement records should be showing in individual member pages.
We don’t know why they didn’t get posted when they ran last Thursday morning, that’s being looked into.
If you download them from MUIR, you may need to rename them to use them in your pairing program.
I will get them posted on the legacy supplement area later today.
I downloaded the tsv file and am using it with WinTD. Seems to work but it is giving a few of the unrated players a 0 as a rating. I believe we had that problem with the first supplement generated by the new system.
Here’s what I see on regrtg for the latest allratings tsv file:
0* 196
0/01 2
0/02 11
0/03 32
0/04 1
0/05 2
None of these make any sense, of course.
I still don’t see any supplements. Only allratings and allmembers. Where can i find the supplements? Thanks
MUIR’s nomenclature is different than what we used on MSA/TDA.
The allratings file is the same as the tab-delimited file with all 6 ratings systems, the two allmembers files are the same as the Gold Master DBF files each with 2 ratings (regular/blitz and regular/quick.) All 3 files have pretty much the same number of IDs in them,
You may need to rename them for WinTD or SwissSys, I don’t know a lot about the other pairing programs and what file names they expect to find.
At this time, automated downloads of files (once you figure out the new naming system) is not yet possible because the only download options are behind the TD portal login. I know several of the pairing program authors are working on using the public APIs to do member lookups, but these are rate-limited. Key-authenticated APIs more oriented towards TD use are on the future projects list.
The much smaller monthly supplement files are no longer being generated, insufficient demand for them.
Is the text version of the Golden DB not going to be created in the future?
Is there some specific need for it in that exact format? If no compelling reason to keep it, there is no reason to waste the time in creating it. If it is for personal use then just use the DBF format or the use the all ratings tsv if you need more info than the Golden file.
How can the DBF files be viewed without paying for a DBF files viewer? Is the All Files tsv viewable without paying for a viewer? I did not realize there were 2 links in the grid.
All modern spreadsheets read them fine – I have used excel and libre office calc they can be a bit slow to load, but most folks would save into faster spreadsheet format after first load..
(edit: Yeah, million row limit on spreadsheets - and I must have been thinking of a different DBF and this is the reason I started using DBF commander)
There are several free DBF editors – I use DBF commander - free version. Even in the free version there are plenty of nice DB commands.
I have Excel 2007 and I wanted to confirm, perhaps at times, that the tournament is using the DB data.
Is the Golden DB considered the Monthly Supplement to use for our monthly tournaments as required in the rule book?
It is the default and strongly suggested, not really required.
Almost all scholastic local tournaments here use the live rating - sometimes the kids play on a Saturday and they want to see that rating when they play on Sunday. No real downside to doing that in the scholastic sections and it makes the kids/parents happy.
When I do a tournament, I always post the supplement that will be used with a note of TD discretion to use a later one (only if it is higher and most of the time it is for newer players who may have played more games) - I post the latest rating/date on the registration list in addition to the normal, official rating.
Is Chessnut still able to reference the required ratings “supplement” file as the USCF rules book says to reference, or has that been compromised?
The rule book does not use the term “Monthly Supplement”, only “last-published US Chess rating”.
28C. Ratings of players.
The rating entered on a player’s card is the last-published US Chess rating in the rating list specified in the Tournament Life section of Chess Life, unless use of a different rating list was specified in the advance publicity for the tournament, or the director has assigned a player a rating. Note that an assigned rating (28E) used for a tournament may or may not be used for future tournaments. See also the first TD TIP for 28A.
I mention this only to note that you could just look at the last rating given a month for a person online and that would be as accurate as the DBF or TSV files.
@KenFarrar Chess Nut is able to consume the rating files from USCF. Since it is cloud based, we import the ratings one time each month and all of the 1500 clubs using Chess Nut then have access to the latests (and older vintage) ratings without any uploading or work on their part
You can see for yourself by searching for any player on Chess Nut:
The system will look at your event dates to figure out the proper vintage to use. There is nothing you need to do unlike what others here are going through.
… and there was a time where we did ratings look-ups manually where the supplements were only every two months with only the annual being a fuller listing – your on-site last minute registration always seemed to be some guy that you had to thumb through a bunch of books to find the latest published rating. A lot of TDs would update a local list of players’ ratings each time a book was published – live ratings pretty much impossible unless the last tournament they played in was one yours and you had the xtab – of course it was common for tournaments to take over a month to get rated, too – last month I had one that was rated less than 5 minutes after the last game was over - I was hoping that someone would ask me when did I think it would be rated so I could reply it was already.
There are currently no plans to produce text-based versions of the golden database files, because all that information, and more, is in the all-players tab-formatted (TSV) file.
Excel has a limit of about 660,000 rows, so neither the TSV file or the (golden) DBF files will fit. There are other tools that can read DBF files that do not have that limit.
The monthly files, which were much smaller as they only contained the players whose rating changed since the last rating cycle, are not currently being generated, and there have not been many requests for them. The real disadvantage to the monthly files is that they don’t contain updated membership expiration dates for the thousands of players whose expiration date has changed but whose rating did not change. That’s less of an issue these days with online membership records.
Is the USCF providing what it says in the rule book that TDs must use for tournament player ratings?
I believe the ratings shown on a player’s page at ratings.uschess.org or downloadable from the TD portal there meet the requirements of the rulebook as excerpted below. Is there a reason you think they don’t?
28C. Ratings of players.
The rating entered on a player’s card is the last-published US Chess rating in the rating list specified in the
Tournament Life section of Chess Life, unless use of a different rating list was specified in the advance publicity for
the tournament, or the director has assigned a player a rating. Note that an assigned rating (28E) used for a
tournament may or may not be used for future tournaments. See also the first TD TIP for 28A.
TD TIP: Players sometimes show the director a US Chess crosstable, or their rating from the US Chess web page.
It is common practice to allow players to use those ratings if those ratings are higher than their last published
rating (28E1).28E. Assigned ratings for rated players.
The director may assign a rating to any rated player.
28E1. Rating level.
The assigned rating shall not be lower than the player’s last published US Chess rating, or its foreign or FIDE
equivalent, adjusted if necessary, if the player lacks a US Chess rating.
28E2. Cause for assignment.
A rating may be assigned only for reasonable cause, including, but not limited to, the following:
a.
The player has shown significant superiority to those in a particular class.
US Chess Federation’s Official Rules of Chess, V 7th Edition, 1-1-24
80
b. The player has demonstrated a tendency to achieve much better results when significant prizes are at stake
than when they are not.
c.
The player’s rating has recently dropped into a lower class due to results that are statistically highly
unlikely.
d. The player’s moves, time management, statements, or other actions during play in a previous tournament
have caused the director to conclude that the player did not make a reasonable effort to avoid losing games.
28E3. Notification.
The director should notify a player assigned a rating, in advance of the tournament if possible, so the player will
have this information when deciding whether or not to enter. However, such notification is not always possible,
since the cause for assignment may not be evident to the director until the late-registration period, or even during the
tournament.
