At the tournament I am helping out with this weekend, we have a player, Mark Aughenbaugh who said he played in one USCF rated tournament back in the 70’s. Can anyone find a rating for him? Thanks
Not that I think there are a lot of people with that name, but a state where he was from might help.
Alex Relyea
All I know is the tournament he played in was in Oregon so he was likely from Oregon.
It’s in the 1976 Annual list:
Mark Aughenbaugh (OR)
ID# 10503957, rating 1460/6.
– Hal Terrie
[quote=“Micah Smith”]
At the tournament I am helping out with this weekend, we have a player, Mark Aughenbaugh who said he played in one USCF rated tournament back in the 70’s. Can anyone find a rating for him? Thanks
Micah, it is indeed shocking by now that you do not understand that such issues are HIGHLY improper regarding specific individuals to be handled in a public
forums, and further that the correct way to handle such issues is to contact the USCF office.
Rob Jones
usc
It looks like Hal’s old supplements are even older than mine! Good job.
Please remember that the MSA (and USCF records) do not go back into the 70s & 80s. However, there are a few people with some old paper supplements. That does not mean that a rating from an old paper supplement will be accurate. It can be used for estimating a rating to be used for pairing purposes. If the player has not played for 30 or more years, then they are an unrated. That is likely how the USCF will treat the player, and they will most definitely get an new ID number. The only exception would be a USCF Life member, as they have a specific ID for life even if inactive.
Larry S. Cohen
Rule 28G. Old ratings. Old ratings of inactive players are still valid.
MSA may not have the 80s and earlier, but the USChess records go further back. They do have the paper supplements from before MSA and the also have a lot of paper cross-tables from back then. They do handle requests for uncovering old ratings for long-lapsed members that are rejoining. When doing so the old ID can be reactivated.
A player who has been absent from tournaments for more than a quarter century would only be restarted as unrated if the player did not reveal the existence of the former rating and/or the TD did not notify the office of the existence of the former rating. The player’s initial tournament may not use an unverified old rating but even if the player is listed as unrated on the tournament cross-tables the player isn’t really unrated.
This is completely untrue. If you have an old player returning to your tournament DO NOT get him a new ID. It is usually possible to find his old rating and, if he played within the last 40 years, his ID. Don’t create confusion by causing the office to have to link two IDs and make every TD who directs this player in the future hate you.
Alex Relyea
Isn’t there some magic cumulative supplement than covers much of the situation before MSA? And if so, is there a reason it hasn’t been scanned in? (Geez, you would hope that somewhere there would have been a floppy with the original that was sent to the printer).
I no longer have a copy but the 1985 annual rating supplement had two or three columns per page, 50 to 60 names/IDs/ratings/Expirations per column and was hundreds of pages. I’m not sure how many names had been purged off of that. The annuals prior to 1985 would each have all the ratings that changed during the year.
The 1985 plus the annuals for 1986-1991 would handle most needs. Maybe the IDs/latest ratings from the later annuals are already in MSA. Maybe the 1985 book is already in MSA.
Scanning all of those pages would be a significant task. When the IL Chess Assn put its old bulletins on line it crowd-sourced the scanning. That might work here as well, though office review would likely be necessary to make sure everything was covered. From a practical standpoint there is a decline in the number of members returning after a quarter-century or longer absence. The IL scholastic growth really kicked off in the early 1980s, however, so we may be looking at another 15-30 years before we no longer have pre-MSA players returning to tournament play.
What is the predictive value of a stale rating from more than twenty-five years ago?
While it’s nice from a “purity” standpoint to want to reconnect long-absent players with their old IDs and ratings, at some point I think it’s worth asking whether it is worth the time and cost to do so. While we do have players from a quarter century back turn up every so often, it is still quite uncommon. When this happens, how often is the player’s old rating a reasonable estimate of the player’s skill? If the person has been playing online, it is quite possible he is much stronger than his rating would indicate. If he hasn’t played chess much (or at all) in the intervening years, it may well be that he is weaker than his rating would indicate. Is it truly worth staff time to hunt down the very old rating and ID in printed rating lists?
Let me note an analogous situation in FIDE. Player title norms never expire according to FIDE regulations. However, simply as a practical matter, FIDE required that title norms earned before July 1, 2005 had to be registered with the FIDE office before July 1, 2013, or they would be considered to have expired. That was almost certainly a decision taken on purely practical considerations. FIDE record keeping was almost certainly not (well) automated before 2005, and there is also the difficulty of verifying that old title norms were in compliance with the title rules in effect when they were earned.
I do think it is worth considering making the start of MSA the cutoff for reconnecting to old ratings. If a returning player has even a vague recollection of his old rating, nothing stops the TD from assigning the player that rating for pairing and prize purposes.
More than the predictive value of an age-based rating.
Alex Relyea
Seems similar to asking what the predictive value of a 20-year-old stale rating is. If you are going to approach that from a mathematical viewpoint then you may want a rating formula that takes into account the potential variances from stale ratings and assigns higher K factors. If you are going to approach from a convenience viewpoint then don’t bother try to justify it mathematically.
The 1985 list which has been mentioned contained all players with ratings whose memberships were active in 1983 or later. That may include some people who played before 1983 but far from all of them. So the earlier annual lists are still necessary if you want to find listings for players from the 1970s. Whether it is really useful to do such research is an issue I will not address. I have the lists and if someone asks, I will see what’s there, as it only takes a few minutes.
– Hal Terrie
We have a player who is coming back to play in tournaments and a chess league after a long hiatus. The last time he played, in fact the only time he is listed as playing a rated tournament, is 1998. His rating is 1692/7. Even if I had not watched him play or played some games with him, I would think that a player who had an initial Class B rating and who had defeated a couple of B players way back when, would be closer in class to present Class B players than a player with a much lower rating would be close to similarly rated players today. I doubt that the USCF will give him a new ID # when he renews this weekend. I will be interested to see if that happens.
Such as the Glicko-2 rating system? (Here is Prof. Glickman’s specification of the Glicko-2 rating system.)
As I recall, the Pittsburgh Chess Club has kept the rating supplements going back to the early 1980’s. They also have Chess Life and Chess Life & Review magazines going back to the 1930’s. The collated magazines and the annuals are kept together. One can see the old ratings in the December issues going back many decades. In the 1960s only Fischer and Reshevsky sported USCF ratings above 2700. In some of those years Fischer was almost 150 points above the #2 US player. The top 50 lists in the earlier era included players in the 2200’s.