10/04/2023
Hello Chess Players and Parents, we greatly appreciate the patience everyone has shown in regards to the delay in the Albuquerque Rio Rancho Open, held in July, being rated by USCF and FIDE. On the day of the event, when our Tournament Director attempted to submit the event, we encountered an odd error with a players USCF ID that was out of our control to fix and contacted USCF. The error was new to them as well and they tried many solutions to fix the issue, and while I know they are still working on untangling it, they did find a way to allow us to rate the event and it was submitted and rated earlier today! You can now find the crosstable here: https://www.uschess.org/msa/XtblMain.php?202306257522-30169514
Tournaments played by the players I'm attendance since the event will also have to be re-rated, and USCF generally runs re-rates weekly. Your posted rating will not change however, only live, but you will see the longterm changes of this event reflected on your November posted rating.
We have also recieved an apology on behalf of USCF by Boyd Reed, Director of Events for USCF, which we have included below.
"On behalf of US Chess, I sincerely apologize. What I write from here is based on my understanding of the situation. However, I do not have authority to make a final call on this. Definitive answers would only be available from the Director of Member Services. The rating system has been classified as a member service – arguably, our most important one. So, Member Services oversees situations such as this.
I sent the following text on August 19: “Regarding the rating report error: The membership record attached to US Chess ID [Players ID Number] has an anomalous issue with the membership database. The ratings manager group is trying to figure out a way around it that won’t create other data issues (such as losing a player’s rating history). A rebuild of the record has been tried, without success. We have another potential solution, which we are trying to implement now. As soon as there is an update of note to provide, you’ll have it.”
Unfortunately, there has been no update of note, because there may not be a good way of fixing the issue with ID [Players ID Number]. This is best illustrated by looking at the MSA page for this player. Please note that ID [Players ID Number] is marked as a duplicate ID in the header of the page. However, the reference ID (in parentheses) is given as…[Identical ID Number]. I frankly have no idea how this circular reference was created. It was certainly not intentional, and I don’t think it’s even possible to do that intentionally. I’ve never seen anything like this before in our database, and I’ve been involved with it for the last 10 years, first as chair of the Website Advisory Committee and now as a US Chess employee.
This paragraph will discuss a little of the technical problem we are facing. This anomaly almost certainly happened during a merge process (which has existed both before and after our membership database redesign in July 2020). Occasionally, a member gets two (or more) ID numbers assigned to them. So, when those are brought to our attention, we have a very granular program that allows us to determine which ID number will be kept active, which will be marked a duplicate, and what records to bring into the active ID. This process, though, requires two distinct ID numbers. The system has never permitted a user to merge an ID number into itself.
I believe Mr. Kormick (Director of Member Services) has invested a lot of time in trying to rebuild the ID without using a merge, which has not worked either. There are a number of possible “brute force” solutions. They involve (IMO) very suboptimal things like assigning a brand-new ID number to the player in question here, which would cause a loss of all that player’s tournament history and may well have bad unintended consequences elsewhere in the database.
Mr. Kormick did ask me for help some time ago with this, and I’ve advised as best I could. However, I work in the Events Department, which doesn’t handle rating reports. I don’t have the cycles available to probe into this issue further than I have. That said, we don’t want the event to remain unprocessed. So, Mr. Kormick (who, in all fairness, has been swamped because of a large increase in US Chess membership in the last six months) will decide how to proceed.
None of the foregoing resolves your issue, but I hope it explains why it’s been so challenging. Again, I apologize to you and your players. Thank you for your time."
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