On Thu, 15 May 2008 08:38:15 -0400, "Chess One"
wrote:


On Sat, 10 May 2008 09:34:49 -0400, "Chess One"
wrote:

... I discovered that Ken Sloancould 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
thecheat.

Phil confuses quality control with fraud detection.

'Confuses?'

Doesn't lack of control data quality actually permit fraud? In this
instance, not only was there no quality control whatever, but an award was
made to a politico for what Mike Murray prefers to call 'fraud'.

For the first issue, clearly Tanner is responsible, but USCF's ratings
department is /as/ responsible, since after all, if you keep geting rated by
chess officials, can you be doing anything wrong?

The folks who receive the rating reports, enter the data and publish
the ratings can hardly be expected to determine that some of the paid
USCF members in the crosstable don't really exist, or didn't really
play in the event. And the spurious events didn't all come in a
batch -- they were nicely separated both in time and space. As I
remember, Tanner was strong enough that the fake events didn't stand
out as egregious anomalies. Some nice detective work by Sam Sloan.

But the 'fraud', as Murray terms it, is the reponsibility of the 'awards'
system. Not only for Tanner, but for the gent writing to in the NY Times
about getting his own award, with no apparent invigilation whatever - no
questions, no data = master title and rating floor.

If this second instance happened as you describe, some guy just writes
in and gets a 2200 floor -- yeah, that's a big deal, much worse. Who
was the guy?