A few questions on including a foreign rated player in my first rated tournament.
I’m a (club) TD who is organizing my first USCF rated (quick quad) tournament. I have never submitted results. I’m working to enable a German player to play in this small event.
Joerg Lohse is a veteran (30 tournaments) player from Germany. I’ve validated (by searching on “Lohse” at German Chess Federation site - schachbund.de/index.html - seems to be German rated about 1635. He’s also provided me hardcopy of similar info.
I had a German player and his 12-year-old son play together in three tournaments I ran this summer. The father's German rating was just under 1100 and the son's was just under 1400. For their first tournament I assigned them estimated ratings of 1300 and 1600, respectively (by adding 200 points and "rounding" up), which put them both in the Under 1700 Section. The father's post-event USCF rating was 894/4; the son's was 1470/5. The father seemed a bit outclassed (scoring 0-4), but the son finished with 2.5-2.5.
His Lederhosen?
It’s unclear what else will be “unique to this player,” but when the tournament is rated, his performance should be calculated first because he does not have a USCF rating (if you are submitting a USCF membership for him, you should be sure to incude his birthdate, because an unrated player’s age is taken into account when calculating his initial rating).
All players’ ratings are recalculated after each tournament, but a different formula is used to do this once a player has played 26 rated games.
The issue of what rating to use for assigning him to a section or for prize eligibility is separate from the issue of what initial estimated rating to use for the purpose of computing ratings from that event. I would tend to go with Steve Immitt’s or Bill Goichberg’s recommendation (if Bill offers one), they’ve faced this kind of situation before.
BTW, Steve, the standard formula kicks in after a player has more than 8 games, it just isn’t considered an ‘established’ rating until after the player has 26 or more games.
The USCF has no official conversion formula between German ratings and USCF ratings, so if he has no FIDE rating he will be considered unrated. Assuming he’s at least 26, he would have an initial estimated rating of 1300. If he’s under 26, his initial estimated rating is his age in years (and fractions of a year) times 50.
If you have good reason to believe he is significantly above that, you can contact the USCF office and provide them with justification for starting him at a higher initial estimated rating.
They used to use the Ingo system, which basically counted down (the lower the rating the better). There was a conversion formula in earlier editions of the Rulebook, but I don’t suppose it’s very useful any more. I’d either use his national rating, or possibly treat it like FIDE and add 100 points. Bear in mind that this has no effect of his actual rating from the tournament. You’re just trying to assign him a rating that will yield reasonable pairings and prize eligibility.
For pairing purposes, just add 100 or 200 points to the player’s German rating. That should be enough to silence any squawks.
For rating purposes, that’s up to USCF. Let them worry about that. It makes no difference what rating you put on your tournament report to USCF. They’ll re-calculate it anyway.
The only foreign ratings for which there are existing conversion formulas are FIDE and CFC (Canada),
Thus what Bill Smythe says is mostly true, but in the case of an unrated player the office CAN assign an initial rating based on a foreign rating if the TD requests it and provides a reasonable explanation of what initial rating to use and why it is justified. I doubt this happens more than a half dozen times a year, though.
Is this statement made without knowing how the rating system actually works for unrated players?
Ken, I think you included two paragraphs as part of a quote that were actually part of your response to the quote.
I said that TDs can request the office assign a rating, I didn’t say the office had to honor that request. Most of the cases have been pretty easy to approve, as I recall one player was about one game short of a published FIDE rating of well over 2000.
I know of one case where they did not, because the foreign rating involved was one the office had little knowledge of and the supporting information was minimal. (I suspect there aren’t very many foreign ratings systems Walter Brown hasn’t run across.)
On the contrary, I never said that I was absolutely sure that nothing has changed since 1979 (although it’s a bit misleading to cite that particular year, as the latest changes to the rating system were made several years after that). I had incorrectly stated the procedure for calculating an unrated player’s rating because I didn’t check the facts first, which was my mistake.
1 The Rating Algorithm
Before an event, a player is either unrated, or has a rating based on having played N games. A
player’s rating is termed “provisional” if it is based on 25 or fewer games, and is “established”
otherwise. Assume the player competes in m games during the event. Post-event ratings are
computed in a sequence of five steps:
• The first step sets temporary initial ratings for unrated players.
• The second step calculates an “effective” number of games played by each player.
• The third step calculates temporary estimates of ratings for certain unrated players
only to be used when rating their opponents on the subsequent step.
• The fourth step then calculates intermediate ratings for all players.
• The fifth step uses these intermediate ratings from the previous step as estimates of
opponents’ strengths to calculate final post-event ratings.
Furthermore (as I understand it) this temporary initial rating is likely to have absolutely no effect on this player’s (or any other player’s) post-tournament rating, except in the case where this player loses all his games or wins all his games.
I think it does have an effect, Bill, especially if the estimated rating is quite a bit above or below the player’s performance. I’m just not sure how much of an effect it has and there probably isn’t a lot of data to check on it.
OK, I did a small test using the previously unrated player with the highest initial post event rating so far this year.
He apparently does not have a published FIDE rating, so in the absence of any other information his pre-event rating was 1300 (based on 0 games.)
This player went 4-1 in a tournament and had a post event rating of 2445.
If I change that pre-event rating to 2400 (based on 0 games), his post event rating was not changed.
If I change that pre-event rating to 2500 (based on 0 games), his post event rating goes to 2446.
If I change that pre-event rating to 2700 (based on 0 games), his post event rating goes to 2447.
If I change that pre-event rating to 2800 (based on 0 games), his post event rating goes to 2448.
This may not be representative of all results, but it appears as long as the initial estimate is below his actual performance, the post event ratings will not be affected, but if the initial estimate is above his actual performance the post-event ratings will be slightly higher than they would otherwise be.
I wanted to check on the process. I have just handled a USCF membership for a FIDE-rated player and provided his FIDE ID and country. That already appears correctly on his MSA page. Is anything else necessary in order to have the USCF use his FIDE rating to initialize his USCF rating? He currently appears as a normal unrated.
Assuming his USCF record has his FIDE ID, that’s all that is necessary.
When an unrated player has a published FIDE rating, we plug his published FIDE rating as of the start of the event into the conversion formula and use that.
However, per the ratings formula that rating will be considered a provisional rating based on 5 games (if the player’s FIDE rating is under 2150) or 10 games (if 2150 or higher), not one based on zero games as in the example I posted the other day, so that starting rating will have more of an impact on the resulting ratings from that event.
No, all his opponents had established ratings. If you want to check it, the ID for this player is 13995351, the event is COLUMBUSOPEN08, event ID 200807137151.
OK. It is a side effect, but it’s due to the phantom draw at the prior on the extra pass for the previously unrated player. His intermediate rating for the first full pass will be affected (somewhat) by the choice of prior which will then affect (very slightly) the opponents’ intermediate ratings used on the final pass. There should be an affect in either direction as you move the prior rating around, but once you’re above 2500, you start seeing a greater effect because he has opponents rated in the 2100’s and those will get “clipped” to a higher rating.
