FWIW, I am in total agreement with Mr. Zimmerle.
Agreed - it is a rare situation.
One other alternative which would work in most cases (although there might be some cases I don’t understand where it wouldn’t work) is simply to change the number shown on the left hand side. If two players have equal number of points, they get the same number. i.e if two players tied for second, but one got the second place trophy on a tiebreak, they are shown as ranking 1, 2, 2 instead of 1,2,3.
I’m not sure how that works out if there are house players or extra games, though.
The number on the left hand side is the pairing number, not the place number. If you click on that number you’ll get the opponents faced by that person, as well as the results of those games. If you try to read the crosstable, you’ll see things like W 6. How would you read that if there were two sixes?
Alex Relyea
What you display and what happens when you click on it don’t have to be the same thing. The programming would be pretty straightforward, but not a simple one line change.
Is it worth it? It would require a code change, and would make searches very slightly more complex. On the other hand, it would reduce, but not eliminate, the number of phone calls from annoying people who waste everyone’s time demanding the USCF “fix” something that isn’t broken. Whether or not it was worth the effort depends on how often the staff has to deal with the phone calls.
As far as I can tell, that wouldn’t work at all – ever. First, you’re making the crosstable unreadable. You’d barely (if at all) be able to tell who each player’s opponents were. Second, it doesn’t solve the problem (if there is a problem). A player who felt he finished third, but sees himself in the fourth position on the crosstable, will still complain, even though the crosstable says 1,2,3,3 instead of 1,2,3,4.
Bill Smythe
One possible solution:
Sort the results in alphabetical order. The questions mentioned above appear to come about due to the sorting not being in tie break order. Alphabetical sorting would not imply any results order, yet still convey all of the same information.
It would partially solve one problem,and create a brand new one.
The real solution would be to persuade parents that it really isn’t worth the effort to make a phone call to “fix” the order on a web page…but that seems a rather difficult to implement solution.
The best solution (perhaps only slightly worse than no solution) would be my original idea, to allow the organizer to assign “manual tiebreak points” in the range 00-99 to as many players as he wants. Default (if no manual tiebreak points are specified) would be 50, right in the middle of the range.
For example, if three players are tied for first at 4.5-0.5, the organizer could assign manual tiebreak points of 99-98-97 (or 2-1-0, or 83-42-27, or for that matter any three distinct numbers) to these three players, to get the desired listing order.
The manual tiebreak points would not have to be visible to viewers. Let the organizer keep a few secrets if he wants to.
Bill Smythe
The purpose of submitting game results to the USCF is for the USCF to rate them.
But in addition to doing this, the software computes total scores for players and presents the players in score/rating order. This is gratuitous, and wrong, and the MSA shouldn’t do that. The MSA knows the results of the individual games, because that is what the TD’s report, but it does not know anything about final scores and standings.
This problem goes far beyond just tiebreaks:
- The MSA does not know what scoring system was used. It assumes that the tournament used “1 point for a win, half-point for a draw”; but that is not the only system possible under USCF rules.
- The MSA does not know whether there were playoff games used to determine final standings.
- As discussed, the MSA does not know what tie-break system was used.
- The MSA does not know the details of the tournament format. Even when it knows that the tournament was a “Swiss”, there are details it does not know. Players may start with more or less points than others, such as in a handicap tournament or a MacMahon tournament. Players may not necessarily play the same number of games and the final results may not even be based on a simple total of won (and drawn) games.
- The MSA does not know about team tournaments at all, where match points are the main thing which determines the outcome; game points hardly matter; and the number of games won by individual players is of secondary interest.
If you knowingly compute a bogus number and display it as if it is meaningful, it is no defense if you then put up a sign that says “this number might be bogus and might not be meaningful”. Better to not compute bogus numbers at all.
The MSA might attempt to report the results of tournaments, but that would involve collecting the total “scores” and “final standings” (reflecting tie-breaks) from the TD’s, who are the only authoritative sources of information about what systems were used in the tournaments. These total scores and final standings might not have the relationship to the individual game results which the MSA assumes.
Currently, the MSA is a game results/ratings reporting system not a tournament result reporting system. It should not pretend to be what it is not. Totalling wins (1 “point”) and draws (.5 “point”) is meaningless and misleading when you don’t know that this had any relevance to the tournament. The “Total Pts” column in the MSA tournament report should just be removed, and the MSA should just report the individual game results and list the players in final rating order, without implying anything about the “results” of the tournament.
USCF internal records use the original pairing numbers assigned by the TD. This could be score group order, it could be pre-event rating order, or it could be some other order, such as the order in which the registrations were received for that event.
Before a crosstable is posted to MSA, the players are renumbered. At this time the sort order being used is:
- Score Group
- Pre-event Rating
- USCF ID
- Original Pairing #
(3 and 4 are to make sure we have a consistent unique ordering.)
Changing the sort order (to Brian’s suggestion or some other ordering) would require updating MSA for each event. (There are over 162,000 tournaments with over 323,000 sections in them on MSA.)
Whether such a change would reduce or increase the number of inquiries is unclear.
Alternatively, while it may be good to receive additional information from the TD and/or to implement a different sort order, perhaps there are other approaches that are just as useful.
For example, once the data is “grabbed” provide the ability to resort by various tiebreak orders.
Then the MSA data itself wouldn’t need to be resorted, because any resorting would only be on the individual tournament data.
I think it would also be wise for USCF to start working on a bigger picture and redefining input and output with the idea of being able to link to additional places - and to encourage developers to work within that new structure.
The problem is, as explained fairly well by Brian, the data on MSA may not be able to reproduce the tiebreaks from an event, even if we knew what tiebreaks were used. (Some timebreak methods use information we don’t have, too, such as the pre-event ratings for players that were used for that event, which may or may not be someone’s current published rating.)
There aren’t very many tournaments using a scoring method other than 0, 1/2, 1, but there are other reasons why the crosstable as reported for rating purposes might differ from the crosstable that would have been used for computing tie breaks at the event. These situations may be infrequent, but if the USCF website claimed that it was showing events in tiebreak order, that might increase the number of questions raised about them, which might be seen as a step in the wrong direction.
The best ‘solution’ might be to provide a text field for each player for entering prize information, but how many TDs would be willing to enter that information?
This is far from clear, certainly not something that can be programmed yet.
Gee, I thought players were only concerned about finding their new rating. Are they having anxiety attacks about their tiebreak order, too? Tiebreaks are dependent on what other players do after they play you. If you beat them badly enough, they might go into a death spiral and lose the rest of their games or, heaven forbid, withdraw and mess up our tiebreaks entirely. You are lucky and have better tiebreaks if they recover and play well. Come to think of it, should we also have the tournaments ordered by who was “lucky”, since we all know that the player who played best traditionally comes in second while the “lucky” player comes in first? TDs will have so much fun sending in their tournament reports based on “luck” or tiebreak order, especially those who select a different tiebreak order than the standard ones suggested in the Rulebook.
Personally, I am satisfied with the way the MSA tournament records show results by score group and pre-event rating order. It makes it easier to find and explain to players and parents. I usually tell parents that their child has tied for a trophy, but you win some and lose some when it comes to tiebreaks. When I can, I will send a “tied for first” plate to the player who came in second after tiebreaks. Most parents are more concerned about ratings first and then that their child won a prize, no matter how large or small. Funny thing, the kids are more excited about the book or software they won as a door prize than the trophy they won. Oh geez, does this mean that I will have to send in tournament reports based on door prize order? More work to do for the harried TD, and more programming problems for the USCF.
Same here.
I think it’s a case of children being concerned, and probably even more frequently, Chess parents.
The more I think of it, the more I am persuaded that there should be no change at all, except possibly those changes recommended by Brian Mottershead. The USCF provides a rating service, and the information on the chart shows all the information necessary to compute the post event rating. Trying to use it for any other purpose is likely to not work.
Having the crosstable there at all is great. Having it in score order is great, too, and that’s easy. Having it in any kind of tiebreak order would be not so great, and not so easy, because of the huge variety of tiebreak systems (and variations thereof) in use, and the wishes of various TDs to have the players listed in some specific order.
There are only about two possible ideas that make any sense at all:* Leave things just the way they are (in rating order within scoregroups), OR
- Allow (but don’t require) TDs, in some simple way, to specify listing order within scoregroups, either for just some of the players or for all.
Bill Smythe
I’ve had many parents who are interested, and they’ve sometimes caught errors because the final report was not correctly sorted. So it frankly seems like a very reasonable request.
Not all of them.
The point was to at least create the ability to sort the event in the correct order, something that can’t happen now. It would seem that ability would likely answer at least some questions since most events - and I would think particularly scholastic events which is where I bet most of these questions come from - sort in the standard rulebook order.
Further, I bet if we put the standard order available online, that even more organizers would be encouraged to sort that way.
No, it means that you can keep doing exactly what you’ve been doing. There was no suggestion to remove the current order.
@Mike Nolan - I understand your comments - but adding the ability to do a standard sort, and disclaiming it as not necessarily the sort the organizer used doesn’t seem like a bad idea - along with - direct questions to the ORGANIZER in the same disclaimer.
Trying to display tiebreak info through MSA, while a good sentiment, seems like it would create more problems/confusion than it resolves.
Frankly, I find the current MSA crosstable displays to be quite sufficient, and I don’t think the aliteracy of a small minority should cause this utility to change.
If we’re really interested in showing tiebreak/prize order in MSA, perhaps the TD could prepare a prize report through his/her pairing software of choice, which could then be uploaded as an attachment to the rating report. I imagine that such a setup would be optional.
Of course, many TDs don’t use the prize report (which does require some extra pre-tournament setup). And many TDs don’t use pairing software at all, especially in smaller local events. Further complicating the issue is setting up MSA to receive and/or display the prize report. I’m not sure what the native format is for the prize reports prepared by SwissSys and WinTD, but they’d likely have to be converted to HTML. That’s probably better than letting folks upload all sorts of .DOC, .PDF and other files, which would then have to be stored.
I’m having a hard time seeing how doing this creates more problems than it solves. What am I missing?