wrote:
Mike Nolan wrote:
"samsloan" writes:

USCF Rating the Olympiad

We have been having a debate at USCF Executive Board meetings. Bill
Goichberg wants to USCF rate the Olympiads by adjusting the USCF
ratings of the players by a conversion formula. One of the many
problems with this idea is that Mike Nolan will have to write a
computer program to do this, plus it will take approximately 40 to 50
hours of staff time every two years thereafter.

History: 15 years ago, when the USCF office was doing the processing
of ratings for FIDE, I am told that the USCF also used that data to adjust
our player's USCF ratings, though I don't know the exact mechanics of what
was being done.

In September 2005 the Board passed a proposal by the objections procedure
which listed around 8 events that the USCF sends official representatives
to, such as the Olympiads, and mandated that our players' performance in
these events be reflected on those players' USCF rating. (USCF members could
also request in advance of a foreign FIDE event that it affect their
USCF rating, there is a small fee for this.)

The Ratings Committee had come up with a way to do this using the
information on the FIDE website once the event had been rated by FIDE.

However, Bill Goichberg wanted (and the board proposal preferred but did not
mandate) a formula with a higher 'K' factor than the one in the Ratings
Committee's formula.

The Ratings Committee felt that a higher K was mathematically unadvisable.
Eventually Bill relented and agreed to use the Ratings Committee's
methodology, their white paper on this is available at:
http://math.bu.edu/people/mg/ratings/fideuscf.pdf

The programming to implement these adjustments was completed in early
November 2006 and the named or requested events that had occurred between
October 2005 and October 2006 were processed. This affected around 20
players in the 2006 Annual List.

The person at the USCF office who made these entries estimated that it
took him around 18 hours to gather and enter the data for a total of
around 48 entries, but I suspect that was largely due to learning curve
issues, such as knowing what events to look up and where to find the data
on the FIDE website. I think in the long run this task will take 3-5
minutes per player per event. (That means the 2008 Olympiad, where the
USCF would have a total of 10 representatives, might take around an hour
to research and enter.)

One limitation of this process is that it only works after the player has
a published FIDE rating, which requires 9 FIDE ratable games. Thus
for some players representing the USCF, such as most of the participants
in the World Youth Championships, there would be no adjustments to make
as they do not yet have a FIDE rating.

Interestingly enough, Greg Shahade chided the USCF for making adjustments
based on events like the Olympiad in his column in Chess Life Online on
the December Ratings List even though he was still on the Executive Board
in September 2005 when that proposal was initially approved by the Board.

Bill has urged that we now rate all the events of all USCF members
participating in FIDE rated events.

In a typical FIDE Rating List there are around 500 USA players listed,
thus it may take as much as 40 hours of staff time each quarter to look
up the FIDE tournament history for all of those players, take out the
events that were also USCF rated, like the World Open, and then look up
each of the remaining players and events on the FIDE website and enter
that data into USCF rcords.

Sam Sloan has a different idea, he wants the USCF to rate the entire
event for events like the Olympiad. There were about 900 players in the
2004 Olympiad, 10 of them representing the USA, aother 200 or so who had
USCF IDs and ratings, some of them a decade or more out-of-date, and
the rest were not in the USCF database at all. (About 100 of those players
did not have FIDE IDs or ratings even after the 2004 Olympiad was rated
by FIDE.)

My estimate was that IF a full crosstable could have been located it would
have taken around 100 hours of staff time to look up all of the players
to see if they had USCF IDs, assign IDs where needed, update out-of-date
USCF ratings in many cases and then enter the crosstable data. Jerry Nash,
the person who serves as the USCF office's liaison with FIDE, thinks it
would take much longer than that.
--
Mike Nolan

I have read what Mike Nolan has to say. In my opinoin, the USCF lacks
the financial resources to rate these FIDE events becasue the impact on
the membership is too low. This idea, while interesting, will bankrupt
the USCF.

You have either got to be a NERD or BUSINESSMAN about this.

What you need to do is instruct your FIDE Delegate to get FIDE to move
the ratings office *BACK* to the USCF, which I will support.

Marcus Roberts
Permanent Delegate of St Kitts and Nevis to FIDE


Mike Nolan is working against me. He doesn't want to validate my
election petition. Will you lend me $25,000 to fight the USCF?

Sam Sloan