I was doing some historical research in the MSA yesterday and discovered that information which should have been fixed at the time the event was rated is now not correct. Players are shown as being from their current state of residence, not the state they were living in at the time. The result is that we now have crosstables for state and regional titles which make it look like the winning players are not local at all but from way across the country. Has this always been a feature and I just didn’t notice it before?
Yes, this has always been the case, as we don’t store the member state in the event so it comes from the current member record.
It’s sort of possible to reconstruct the actual state from the monthly supplement records, because those contain the state as of that supplement run, so it narrows the window of when someone might have moved.
I’m not sure where members can see access supplement history on MUIR though.
Narrows the window of when someone might have updated their address with US Chess. In my experience many people renew existing IDs for years after moving without updating the states.
Yes, I discovered this a long time ago. When I was doing research on the State Invitationals on MSA a couple of years ago I had to dig deep to figure out what state some players represented in the 90’s and early 2000’s. The Virginia/Maryland/DC area was especially difficult to decipher as they tend to cross state lines in that area to play in events quite a bit. Luckily with juniors I was able to look at scholastic events they played in and better guess where they came from. Interestingly, a couple of years ago I told this to Dan Lucas who was not aware that the states moved as the person moved. He assumed the states remained statis in MSA.
GMs get free US Chess memberships, so I imagine they rarely have any reason to update information held by US Chess, unless they want to keep receiving a paper magazine. GMs are likely to be at the top of most of these lists so it can be frustrating to see players you know have moved to a different state appearing at the top of other state’s listings.