I was recently asked in a PM whether I had anything that would make the task of finding a player’s peak rating simpler. That reminded me that I had cobbled something together a couple of years ago to do exactly that. I’ve polished it up, done more careful testing (and fixed some bugs that made it originally unsuitable for general use), and made it available to anyone who cares.
You can find it here. While it is fairly easy to install in your web browser, unfortunately, it is not entirely trivial for some web browsers (Microsoft Edge and Chrome, I’m looking at you). Please feel free to ask either here or via PM if you have any questions or issues. Also, if you encounter any bugs, I’d like to hear about them (but you won’t run into any bugs ).
(For anyone who is curious about how this works, I have a more readable version of the JavaScript code available here.)
Sometimes that’s not good enough. For example, Millionaire Chess 3 used players’ peak post-event ratings between 1/1/2015 and 8/31/2016. However, I was unaware of a “record by year” page.
An observation: Starting with the home page, knowing the player’s ID number, it took me six clicks to get to the “record by year” page. The URL for that page was generic (did not contain the player’s ID number), so it is not possible to form a URL that will take the user directly to that page. Using the “ancient” interface to MSA, with the player’s ID number, I can enter one URL (admittedly a bit awkward to type) and click my bookmarklet to find the player’s peak regular, quick, and blitz ratings and the dates on which each of those ratings were reached.
I have stubbornly resisted using the “new” site to get to MSA exactly because of the convenience of the “ancient” interface. But, then again, I guess I’m just an old, curmudgeonly geezer …
I’m not a big fan of the current home page, either, Ken. (Poor use of space, for example.) However, it was designed primarily for casual visitors to the website, not for TDs or members looking for ratings information. I also think the way WordPress uses dropdowns is a bit non-intutive.
I tend to use msa.uschess.org as a starting point, and I think a lot of TDs and players use it, too. And that’s fine, the website should accommodate both casual visitors and members/TDs looking for specific information, such as ratings.
Once you’ve got the ‘results by year’ statistics page selected, you can change the member ID to look at other players. (Like most forms-based web pages it uses the HTTP POST method so there’s no way to directly specify the ‘results by year’ option on the command line.) We could change it so that record by year is the default option rather than record by opponent’s pre-event rating, but if we did that surely SOMEONE would complain. :sigh:
).