What are you talking about? Have you already forgotten the issue LAST MONTH when the National Open had to be completely deleted and re-entered because they had neglected to include the first round game that GM Polgar played against some 1500 player?
Alex Relyea
Say what?
Polgar played a single game against the tournament organizer, Fred Gruenberg. Apparently this was done as a courtesy, so that Gruenberg, who is retiring, could say he played a GM. It seems that the TDs did not realize at first that it was meant to be a rated game, so the rating report had to be revised to add it. I don’t see this incident as a big deal. Let it go.
– Hal Terrie
Sounds like using a nuke to kill a mosquito. Wouldn’t it have been easier to send it in as a separate 1-game tournament and eat the $3? (I have some problems with the inflexibility of the current system for dealing with minor corrections, but that’s a discussion for another day.)
I think that the system does very well dealing with minor corrections. I don’t agree with the implicit idea that adding a whole new player (or two) to a section is a minor correction. Probably off topic here, in any event.
Alex Relyea
I can’t agree. If you pair the bye with someone for a house game, adding one extra player later should not require deleting the entire tournament and uploading it again. Nor should changing the dates, which are hard-coded to the tournament ID. However, this really belongs in a new thread under “Tournaments” if anyone wants to discuss it.
It’s fairly easy to add a player or a round to an event while it is being prepared to be rated.
That’s when house players and such should be added to the event.
How does a house player get left off the crosstable at the time it is, at least according to the chief TD, ready to be rated?
Similarly, how does the event date change after it has been rated, unless it was wrong in the first place? TDs should check that sort of stuff BEFORE they submit the event to be rated, not afterwards.
Moving this and a few related posts to a different thread, possibly in a different forum, would be a good idea.
Because someone made a mistake, of course. It happens, Mike, whether you like it or not. You have to design software to suit the users, not the other way around. The only worthwhile question is whether the changes needed would be prohibitively difficult or expensive, which is quite possible.
That’s pretty much why we do it the way we do.
Most corrections involve changing the ID for a player or changing the result of a game. On occasion it involves changing who played whom in a round. Those types of changes are fairly commonplace, the office probably makes a hundred of them each month. (For a variety of reasons, we decided not to give TDs the ability to make changes to events after they are rated.)
Increasing the number of players or rounds in an event is not really a minor matter, it involves making substantial changes to the database, and we don’t have the validation suite that we have when we’re checking events before they’re rated.
Similarly, changing the tournament ending date and thus the event ID involves many database operations.
In both cases, this is something that might happen once a month or less, so it just isn’t worth writing, IMHO.
This is really not a “USCF Issue,” and it belongs under “Tournaments.” I make the point because the last thing we need is to turn technical questions like this into political issues.
BTW, when I told Phil Smith (the backroom chief) about the extra game that had to be added to the National Open, his response would have violated the AUG. One has to wonder who knew that game was even being played?
Making that change might have inconvenienced some players for a few hours, it did not affect anyone’s published rating, not even their re-rated rating from that event, since the corrected event was in the system well before the next scheduled rerate.
What I said would likely happen when I presented TD/A to the Delegates in 2004 has come true: We’ve gone from “Wow, you got that event rated in 6 hours!” to “&^%$, you didn’t get that event rated for 6 HOURS!!”
Mike,
You do a great job!
Best,
If you really want an answer to that, try this: A match in one of the Amateur Teams is submitted, entered per the result form, and the tournament rated. After it goes up on the MSA, a player informs the TD that he didn’t play that round, they used someone else for one round and never changed the result form. Unless there happens to be someone on the rating report who never played any games, fixing this is a real pain. I’m not criticizing the system per se, but when you wrote the software you made a number of design choices. Presumably these made sense from the programmer’s viewpoint, but some of them are not ideal from the end-user’s perspective.
So what’s the big deal about re-rating the National Open? It’s not as if somebody had to re-type the entire crosstable. Just add the player and re-submit (with the help of the USCF office, if necessary).
Bill Smythe
right - the Pairing Chief might have to confer privately with the Director of IT - perhaps going through the Assistant ED.
Some people may not get it… but you really made me chuckle, Ken.
Thanks!!! (o:
Nice. Underrated.