"SBD" wrote in message
...
On May 9, 3:29 pm, Mike Murray wrote:
On Fri, 9 May 2008 13:40:02 -0400, "Chess One"
wrote:

I spent half an hour on the phone this week interviewing someone who
wants
to bring chess ratings into the C21st, and who will additionally provide
Chessville with 4 articles on the subject. He operates an outfit in
competition to 'standard' ratings, but is still true to Elo - in fact
more
true than those systems which use ratings floors and ceilings. Phil
Innes

So his system cuts sandbaggers and manipulators a little more slack?

Yes it is probably that Chess Express nonsense he has been touting for
some time now.

I think Tanner's political award came from USCF - he got a master's title,
and a rating floor. No one seems to have been responsible for detecting
either sandbagging or manipulating, certainly no one at USCF, and nothing
happened to USCF's system after the 'awards' were made.

After pointing that out in the NY Times Gambit Blog and wondering how many
similar cases there may be, another guy wrote in to say that he asked USCF
for a master's title by sending them a letter requesting one, and they gave
him one, and a ratings floor - they did not look at any playing records
[they threw away pre-1990 records] nor asked him to sign anything.

In the above, Dowd-ing Thomas and Investigator-Murray are happy to cast
aspersions on a system where anything amiss would be immediately visible,
and to the public - alarm bells would sound, and the USCF political award
system could not operate, since this other system is not a /secret/ one

That sort of thing, these guys attest, is 'nonsense'.

What they consider sense is this: Oddly enough, I discovered the USCF rating
award system's political secrets [RASPS] via the writings of Ken Sloan not
Sam Sloan. Sam Sloan merely outed Tanner, but I discovered that Ken Sloan
could offer no explanation for the complete absense of quality control at
USCF's rating department which permitted the situation, and secondly, that
those who proposed Tanner's award for a master title also couldn't spot the
cheat.

This second factor admits that such titles are either completely
uninvigilated, and in fact demonstrate no quality control exists whatever,

OR,

the system is designed to be secret, since then chess burocrats can award
each other titles.

The great irony here is that the very same people who cast a blind eye on
USCF's activities, continue to rubbish others - naturally in the vaguest of
terms, but unnaturally to suggest that others have not solved problems which
continue to exist with USCF's own system.

The vaguer it gets, the more crooked and political it becomes.

The ratings system is either a brand, ie, USCF's, which is therefore an
unbid award system in itself constituing a monopoly, or it is a for-cost
operated system for American chess players.

If it is the first of these, then USCF people will object to any competition
to their rating monopoly - and if it is the second, then it seems a tad
over-priced compared with competition, something like 3x, and in fact a
profit center, not an at-cost service at all.

Phil Innes