I got my one and only SM norm scoring 50% in a 9-round Swiss event (US Championship). It helped that only one of my opponents was lower rated than me and not by much at that. So, a possible flow in the formula is not to do with event length, but with treatment of lower rated players. Scoring a Senior Master norm in a present format US Open would indeed be very hard due to having to play down a lot. In a sectional event, like World Open, it should be manageable.
Anyway, it’s pretty clear Rating Committee put a lot of thought into this and the (insane) difficulty to score norms when playing mostly against lower-rated players was fully intentional (and well intentioned). Personally, I have no complaints. It’s likely I will be stuck with just one SM norm for the rest of my life, but I will treasure it all the way. That same performance also gave me an IM norm. Between SM and IM norms they seem to be about equally hard to get. One needs 5 SM norms rather than 3 IM norms, but at least there are no “foreign federation” and other extraneous requirements to worry about. I was lucky that US Championship was exempt from that as a Zonal qualifier.
Here are the US Opens since 1992 and the number of senior master norm performances in them (including ones by players already holding the life senior master title):
By comparison, here are the number of senior master norm performances from the World Opens since 1992. All but one of these norms (one from 2008) was earned in the top section, which is certainly a target-rich environment:
Thanks to the Ratings Committee for putting this together, and thanks to Mike for a nice implementation! Looking through events in which I earned norms brought back several memories: The first time I went 4-0 in a scholastic event, driving to Las Vegas for a CCA tournament, and playing in a National High School event in Lexington, Kentucky.
Realizing that I haven’t earned a norm in almost fifteen years was a needed reality check (I had thought that I was playing well recently).
A few of the events do not seem “norm-worthy”. An example is uschess.org/msa/XtblMain.php … 0-20049809
The chief TD is a good friend of mine but I think that his tournament shouldn’t qualify for norms. Since ladder events and rated club games give a player some degree of influence over his own pairings, I suggest a rule intended to filter out such events, such as:
However, an existing rule should have disqualified this event anyway:
I still want to suggest to the Ratings Committee that no more than 20% of the games in an event should be unplayed, as otherwise the following ugly tournament awards a norm to me (it was a collection of ladder challenges over several weeks of after-school chess club meetings). uschess.org/msa/XtblMain.php … 0-20049809
The ‘cannot play the same player more than twice’ rule applies to that PLAYER, not to the entire event.
It would be grossly unfair for you to have a great event and not be able to earn a norm because SOME OTHER PLAYER (whom you may not even have faced) played the same opponent more than twice.
I had thought that provision was implemented, but will double-check.
I would also call people’s attention to BINFO 201000203, in which I proposed several tests to look for match-like events. (Such events would not be eligible for norms and would be subject to the limits on ratings changes due to matches.)
I have not heard any negative comments from the Board on this proposal, and Bill Hall has told me to go ahead and start working on implementation, including retroactively applying it to events.
Events in which there are large numbers of unplayed games can present problems, but there are probably as many valid reasons for such events as there are suggestions of ratings manipulation.
When you talk about unplayed games, are you talking games that were paired, but somebody forfeited, or just tournaments where lots of players took byes along the way, so they never got paired? The local clubs around here do a lot of “one game per week” tournaments, usually for four weeks, and players take byes all the time because they can’t make it all four weeks. There are many weeks when less than 80% of the players actually show up. So would someone who does show up all four weeks and plays four good games be unable to earn a norm from that tourney because so many people took byes?
I discovered another interesting scenario while looking through my norm tournaments on that page. I earned one of my norms in a 6 round tournament where I played 5 games in one section, but my 6th game was in an “extra games” section, because I had a bye, and I played someone else who had a bye in a different section. This actually happens to me a lot, because I “play up” fairly often, so I’m frequently one of the lowest in my section. In that case, I took my 1500 rating into an U1800 section when there was an U1600 section available.
Are norms based on performance in one section of the tournament, or in all games played in all sections combined?
I found it interesting that I earned a couple of norms while playing up that way, despite usually only scoring 1-2 points in 5 games in those types of tournies. I guess that’s a result of playing higher level players and doing well enough to keep my rating from dropping. I earned norms appropriate for my rating level, not the rating level of the section and opponents.
Norms are based upon the games in a section, not on all games in all sections of an event. (The same rule is used for bonus points when computing ratings.)
And as with ratings, if a player has more than one pairing number in that section, such as an event that supports re-entries or a multiple schedule event that is merged, then the combined total of those games is what is used for computing norms.
It seems reasonable to me that playing up is likely to produce more norms, yet another benefit to playing up.
Norms have been recomputed excluding the events where a player faced the same opponent more than twice. (And events that were part of today’s rerate have also now been processed for norms.)
Titles have also been updated reflecting the corrected and updated norms list.
These are interesting, but I wonder how quickly they’ll catch on. Will people continue to use the terms expert and master or will it be candidate master and life master in the near future? I suppose I could soon overhear a chess player mentioning that he is a class A-player, but still has a few category-1 norms to go. I suppose I personally value FIDE titles more, but these are too new to judge fairly.
The really intriguing thing will be if these are used for prizes or entry fees at some point.
This I understood, and in the event cited I had played two opponents more than twice, each. Thank you for putting in the fix and re-running the norms so quickly!
I had in mind tournaments where many players are often not paired. Picture rated ladder games, where a player picks his opponents to increase his norm chances, then suddenly becomes tired and can’t stay for another game when challenged by a youngster who is a 150-point underdog. Another less than desirable outcome is shown in the event that I cited (in which 62% of games were unplayed) - I received a “gimmie” norm mostly because I played a large number of games.
The one-game-per-week example that you gave does not have the drawbacks that ladder events have, yet it would often fall victim to my suggested rule. This makes the rule a bad one. I would still like to find a way to exclude many of those easily manipulated tournaments, but I don’t have another suggestion right now.
Win milestones have been updated. I think we may start to update those on a daily basis, but norms and titles will only be updated on a weekly basis following the weekly rerate. (We learned during testing that waiting until after the first time an event was rerated increased the number of norms earned in those events.)
I was going to use ‘Milestones’ myself, if I can get it to fit, (saving ‘Stats’ for things like win/loss statistics), but the problem is that all of the tabs are GIFs, and I don’t have the font that Gary Prince used in creating them back in 2002 (my font expert isn’t sure what font it is), so I have to recreate ALL of them, and then probably adjust the spacing so that they don’t look weird.
Yet another reason why MSA needs to be completely rewritten.