Ratings and tsh

How to maintain a rating system using tsh.

Updated Wed Oct 8 10:33:57 EDT 2008 for tsh 3.260.

One of the more popular features of tsh is its calculation of tournament ratings. When you set up your tournament’s “.t” files with information about your players, you enter their pretournament ratings, and if necessary their career game totals (depending on your rating system, you may be able to use the “USERATINGS” command to do this automatically). As your tournament progresses, you can display current ratings using the “RATings” and “ScoreBoard” commands. At the end of your tournament, you can submit ratings data to your rating officer using the “SUBMIT” command (if your rating system is supported), or by generating a ratings report using commands like “ABSPgrid” or “AUPAIR” and emailing the results.

The rest of this section describes in greater technical detail what is involved in connecting tsh to a rating system, and its intended audience includes ratings officers and directors who want to discuss tsh with their ratings officers. As always, if there is anything that tsh doesn’t yet do that you would like it to do, please contact John Chew at jjchew@math.utoronto.ca. Each one of tsh’s features is there because someone asked for it; if a feature is missing, it’s just because you haven’t asked for it yet.

Manual Rating Systems

Example users: Philippines, Toronto Speed

If you have a small rating system, the effort involved in automating it may not be worthwhile. You can keep a spreadsheet or even a text file listing what each player’s current rating is, refer to it when writing “.t” files, and update it based on the output of the “RATings” command at the end of each tournament.

If you are using the NSA ratings model, make sure that you keep track of each player’s career game total, and set and update it appropriately, as player ratings are supposed to be more volatile for their first 50 games.

At the cost of just a little more effort, if you keep the text file listing player ratings and game totals online, your directors will be able to use the “USERATINGS” command to set up their “.t” files and not risk introducing errors doing so manually. If you want to do this, contact John Chew to register your rating system’s web site address (he can provide one if you don’t have a web server).

Legacy Rating Systems

Example users: ABSP

If you have an existing legacy rating system that cannot easily be connected to the web, you should determine what ratings data format it uses (tsh currently supports its native format, Homan, Aupair and ABSP grid formats), and have your tournament directors e-mail the appropriate reports to your ratings officer. If you can persuade your ratings officer to post current ratings online, your directors can use the “USERATINGS” command.

Automated Ratings Systems

Example users: U.S. NSA

If you have a large rating system or like automation, you should set up (or ask John Chew to set up) a web page to which your tournament directors can upload ratings data using the “SUBMIT” command. Once it’s uploaded, your web site may immediately calculate new ratings and make them available for download to the “USERATINGS” command, or it may hold them for manual verification, as the U.S. NSA currently does.