[tournament-org] TournamentEntryGrades

[Richard Wheeldon]

I make a point of telling folks what grade they're down at and asking them if it's correct. 90% say it is. For a handful it's off by one. Most of the really crazy, off-by-miles grades are for folks who very rarely turn up and particularly for youngsters or those weaker than 20kyu - GOR vs. grade isn't going to do anything for those.

I'm not wowed by the idea of a new tool. There are enough old and / or half-baked bits of software making up the BGA website as it is. Certainly, if Jonathan was to spend any such time on that rather than moving / updating the website I'd consider it the wrong priority.


I like the idea of both of Matt's changes. The second has value even if the first isn't implemented. However, they wouldn't make my top list of desired changes. Personally, I'd much rather see the following:
 - Ability to resize / move / expand the result entering panel so it shows more than 5 lines at a time.
 - Ability to view the draw / ranklist / prizelist on screen without printing it
 - Ability to get a list of all European players not just UK - useful for tournaments with more foreigners

Richard

On 6/16/2019 5:14:21 PM, Matt Marsh via tournament-org <tournament-org at lists.britgo.org> wrote:
Geoff: thanks for your thoughts on this topic.
I agree that as tournament directors, we do have a duty to check entry grades and ensure that people are entering tournaments at the 'right' grade.
The 'right' grade should generally mean the grade based on the player's current EGF rating (GoR). Of course there will be some exceptions to this and the tournament director needs to make appropriate decisions to deviate from that where needed - but that should be the default.
If there was a tool such as the one Geoff suggests below then I would likely use it - I'd have to see how it fits in with my workflow, but I'm in favour of things that help me in this task so I'd definitely look at it.
I would like to point out a couple of changes that I've proposed Geoff make to Godraw which I also believe would help:
* Currently the 'player file', which Godraw uses to auto-complete players and set their default grades, uses the player's last entry grade to set the player's grade instead of GoR. This means that the default grades are very often wrong. A player's grade is being set to the grade that they started the last tournament at (which itself may have been based on GoR or not) rather than their actual GoR coming out of the last tournament. This doesn't seem sensible to me.

A very small change would surely be to have the player file list people's grade based on their latest GoR - which is far more likely to be the 'right' thing to be using.


* To ensure that the above is even more likely correct, Godraw could warn (on start-up) if the player file is out-of-date (say more than a month old) and tell the user where to fetch a new file from.
I feel like these changes are very small (I don't believe they would require much effort to implement compared to a new tool) and I feel like they would have a sizeable benefit. I also don't feel like they should be very controversial...
If others either agree or disagree with the above I'd be very happy to hear from you as I'm actively campaigning to convince Geoff that these changes would be worthwhile :-)
Thanks,
Matt

On 16/06/2019 16:30, Geoff Kaniuk via tournament-org wrote:
Should tournament entry grades be automatically set to current rating at the time the tournament starts?

I have been thinking about this issue for a while. It has been quite a long process, and I feel that I cannot adequately discuss the idea in a few lines.  I know people are busy, and if you are strapped for time please just skip to the SUMMARY and SOLUTION sections below.

I am interested in your view on this issue. If you agree with the solution suggested, would you actually use it?

PLAYER STRENGTH IN McMAHON TOURNAMENTS
The BGA advises players to enter at a grade obtained by rounding the players' current strength as shown in the rating list. This is good advice, because most of our tournaments are run on the McMahon system. It tries to match players by strength and performance below the bar. Where the individual grade groups are reasonably well populated, we find that the average win rate for the group is about half the number of rounds.  The average grade of opponents in the group is also not far from the group grade. The individual player can expect to win half of his or her games, and meet opponents of roughly similar grade.

All this makes for a satisfactory outcome for players, but it does depend on players entering at a realistic grade. Although the majority of players do enter appropriately, it seems that about 10% to 20% of players don't. Entering at an unrealistic strength gives the player a false impression of individual strength and can adversely affect the rating adjustments of the player's opponents.

Some tournament directors are careful to check entry grades shortly before the tournament, but not everybody does so.  Understandably this is a time consuming process.

THE PLAYER LIST FILE FOR GODRAW
Most tournaments in the UK are run using the GoDraw pairing program. This reads a file containing a list of players to make it easy to enter players manually with just a few keystrokes. Again, not everyone downloads the latest version. In any case the entry grade expressed in the file is just the grade at the last tournament attended by the player and that may well be out of date. So there are calls for that entry grade to be automatically set according to your latest rating.

I have been reluctant to do this on the grounds that there are many reasons why one's grade or rating can be out of date. It is not current BGA policy to do this automatically. Nevertheless it is true that many players do enter at their rated strength, so some way should be found to ease the burden on TD's and players.

ENTRIES COLLECTED BY EMAIL OR TD WEBSITE
Some TD's collect entries purely by post or email, others via a form on their own website. In all these cases data has to be manually transcribed either to cards, a spreadsheet or directly into GoDraw. If its on a spreadsheet, columns for Name, Grade and Club will be present, but the Grade column data will have been provided by the player, probably based on their last tournament entry.

At some point in time, the entry has to be manually input into GoDraw, so we are possibly seeing two time consuming processes:
email -> spreadsheet -> GoDraw.
Unless of course the TD uses the GoDraw 'Import register' feature. This loads a text file easily created by selecting the relevant columns in the spreadsheet.

ENTRIES COLLECTED BY TOURMAN
Some TD's collect entries via the Tourman system. This allows players to search EGD to automatically fill in the majority of fields in a configurable entry form provided by the BGA.  The Grade field is also just the previous entry grade of the player and there have been calls to change this to the grade derived from current strength.

One change that has been made is to highlight the Grade in Blue in the hope that the player will be stimulated to look at the displayed strength field and make adjustments if needed. It is not known how effective this 'nudge' mechanism is!

There are a significant number of players who don't use the search facility. Some of these are not rated, but some are using https: to access the form. EGD currently does not support https: so no search is possible.

Each submitted entry results in an email sent to the TD, but now there is no need to manually enter players into GoDraw.  There is already a web application which can produce a registration file for GoDraw on demand. No spreadsheet is needed for this process.

SUMMARY
1. McMahon tournaments rely on realistic entry grades.

2. Many players do enter at realistic grades, but not all.

3. The entry collection process is quite drawn out.  There seems little point in adjusting entry grades as these may change from time of entry to time of event.

4. Ideally TD's will check every entry grade shortly before the event. Some do, but understandably this is a very time consuming process.

PROPOSAL FOR A SOLUTION
The BGA provides a 'Make Rated Register' web application for TD use.

1. The TD submits an entry list via a text file in a standard format. This file is easily created from a spreadsheet page.

2. Make Rated Register searches EGD to derive an entry grade from current playing strength.

3. It produces a register list for GoDraw. The NOTE field is annotated to show which grades are adjusted and which player names are not recognised.

4. The TD can activate the tool at any time and download the register list for importing into GoDraw.

BGA SUPPORT
There are some security concerns that will need to be addressed by the Online Committee. Only TD's should be able to access the tool.

A mechanism would need to be set up to allow known TD's to upload an entry list for processing.


--
Matt Marsh
matt at crazedbytes.net [mailto:matt at crazedbytes.net]
+44 (0)7795 297779 [tel:+44-7795-297779]
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