Whatever.
How do I look up my win/loss/draw stats? I think I’m close to 100 wins.
Oh, God . . . please do not put that on a tab. At least, not one that’s visible to others.
Until such a time as Mike Nolan changes something that breaks it you can use gpcf.net/MSA/msa.htm
I haven’t done anything with it for awhile but it still seems to be working within its’ limitations.
Thanks a lot for showing me my stats. I was very interested in seeing what mine would be like. Still I was more looking for someone to explain to me how I can look them up, rather than actually doing it and posting it here 
. There’s a saying something like “catch a hungry man a fish and you’ve given him lunch, teach him how to fish and he is never hungry again.”
wzim wrote the tool that extracts and analyzes the data. See http://main.uschess.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1579. Here, this is how you can fish…
The ‘wins in a row’ type of data may not be accurate if players have overlapping events. In such cases we have no idea when individual games were played, sometimes we see events that take weeks or even months from start to finish.
Additionally in its’ current version it doesn’t catch reentries, so that can throw things off.
‘True’ re-entries (ie, withdraw and re-enter the event for the next round) shouldn’t be that hard because the player wouldn’t have more than one game in the same round, but merged schedules are similar to overlapping events, we don’t know which games came first.
For ratings purposes that’s not important, because the order in which games are played in an event (ie, a section) is irrelevant.
However, if someone plays in more than one section of an event, and those sections have the same beginning and ending date, then once again we don’t know which games came first. (In such a case, we rate them in section number order, so the submitting TD is in charge of ordering them.)
At the time when I was writing my program I never really considered reentries. So once the parser found the individual’s name it did what it was suspose to do and then exited and went on to the next data file. Once I realized it was missing the reentrants I was hesitant to change things because I thought there would be a big time hit by forcing the search to the end of every file. I rationalized that there were few reentries and that most of them would be losses and not that important. If I were to ever go back and revisit the program I would maybe put in an option to include or disinclude reentries.
As for the order thing I would simply redefine it as most games in a row as listed on the MSA pages. 
I have a game waiting to be rated that will not go in for another couple of weeks when we finish the City Championship Playoffs. Last Sunday I played the same individual and that game has already been rated.
Does that mean that if there is a double RR that is entered by having each player listed twice that you would skip half of the players?
So far in 2010, we have rated 8526 sections involving 130,342 players. Of those there have been 216 instances of a player’s ID appearing in a section more than once.
I would think so. I can’t think why that would be any different of a situation than the reentry situation.
Realize when I first wrote my MSA program it was written with just me in mind. Then I thought about sharing it with everyone and spruced it up somewhat. But I’ve never played in a rated double round robin or reentered a tournament so those items never really occured to me. I did have one or two people point out the reentry problem so that did make me aware of it.
But it got to the point where it was about as useful as it was going to get and since I based so much of my parsing on the actual layout of the MSA data I didn’t want to invest much more in correcting some of these issues.
Plus over time you have been gradually adding features to the MSA itself. The only real advantage/disadvantage that my method has is that it automatically download data files of tournaments that have been downloaded once to your local computer. It is and advantage because it is faster and doesn’t put that much of a load on the USCF servers and a disadvantage because with rerates etc your local information could be just wrong. One can force a deletion of and individual’s data and download everything fresh as the program currently exists. It would be nice if there was an option to do that in one operation so to speak.
It’s a rare week when I don’t run across some kind of tournament situation in the USCF database that is not easily explained. 
But I try to do the best with the data we have.
[quote=“wzim”
Realize when I first wrote my MSA program it was written with just me in mind. Then I thought about sharing it with everyone and spruced it up somewhat. But I’ve never played in a rated double round robin or reentered a tournament so those items never really occured to me. I did have one or two people point out the reentry problem so that did make me aware of it.
But it got to the point where it was about as useful as it was going to get and since I based so much of my parsing on the actual layout of the MSA data I didn’t want to invest much more in correcting some of these issues.
Plus over time you have been gradually adding features to the MSA itself. The only real advantage/disadvantage that my method has is that it automatically download data files of tournaments that have been downloaded once to your local computer. It is and advantage because it is faster and doesn’t put that much of a load on the USCF servers and a disadvantage because with rerates etc your local information could be just wrong. One can force a deletion of and individual’s data and download everything fresh as the program currently exists. It would be nice if there was an option to do that in one operation so to speak.[/quote]
I love the program though I found one annoying flaw. When calculating biggest upset it doesn’t take into account provisional ratings. My biggest upset/highest rated win was against a player who had a 2230 rating based on 2 games. His post event rating went down to 1638/7. He is currently rated 1540. That stat is meaningless to me because I really didn’t beat a 2230. I have won against players rated between 2230-2200, but to figure it out I had to resort by differential. One master who I have beaten twice in the MSA years has 34 wins against me. I guess it’s the “blind squirrel finds the nut every once in awhile” law of probability. 
Polly I don’t remember programing it in to avoid provisional ratings. I could see it avoiding unrateds.
You made me curious enough to go look at the code. It does skip the unrated and as a side effect skips the provisional at the same time. Here is how the MSA lists it ( Unrated->1980P5 ) for example, so when the code sees the Unrated word it skips it, so maybe I did do it intentionally. Sorry about that.
I think you’re misreading her complaint. She’s complaining (ever so mildly, we all appreciate the program) that it doesn’t skip the provisionals, so that her greatest upset is against a guy with only two games under his belt, and by the time he settled down, his rating was below hers.
Alex Relyea
The line reads 2230P2->1638P7 so the program would recognize the 2230 rating for calculating upsets. I don’t know if it’s worth the time or energy to skip provisionals or not. Maybe it should skip provisionally rated players with less then 4 games since the provisional rating is only published once it’s based on 4 or more games.