| Bill Smythe 2005-01-27, 9:47 pm |
| "Vince Hart" wrote:
quote:
> .... If a tournament is removed from the record on the grounds
> that it is fraudulent, then ratings should be adjusted to remove the
> effect of the rating. ....
If a tournament is fraudulent, then its removal by a USCF staffer would not,
after all, be improper or scandalous in any way. Your other post led me to
believe that the events were merely being hidden from view. But now it
appears that they were expunged, or at least that there was an attempt to do
so.
As for adjusting the ratings, of course that should be done if possible, but
two considerations play a role here:
(1) If the players in the tournament have played in subsequent events,
there will be a ripple effect beyond belief. All subsequent events played
by any of the players would be affected, as would any even-later events
played by any of their subsequent opponents, etc. One would have to settle
for an approximate correction, changing only the ratings most directly
affected.
Furthermore, I have heard that USCF is already heavily backlogged with such
requests for rating corrections. The complexity of making the corrections,
together with the size of the backlog, together with the ongoing
introduction of new rating software, may make swift corrections impractical
right now.
(2) The rating system is eventually self-correcting, so that, for example,
a 50-point error in a player's rating will be reduced to, maybe, 35 points
after his next tournament, 22 after the one after that, etc. After just a
few tournaments the error will be negligible. It would not be appropriate
to change the player's rating by an additional 50 points after most of the
error had already been smoothed over anyway.
Bill Smythe
|