Sign up for TLA Mail, the USCF's latest service for members and organizers, and receive notification by email of upcoming events. Members can use the signup form in the Members Only Area to sign up to receive emailed announcements about upcoming tournaments that meet their selection criteria. Organizers can get their TLAs into the TLA Mail service by entering them into the Online TLA Service using the form in the TD/Affiliate Support Area.

The USCF Delegates authorized several changes to the membership offerings for young players. Effective immediately, these are the options in effect:

• Young Adult: For those 24 and under. $25 per year, includes 12 issues of Chess Life.
• Youth: For those 15 and under. $19 per year, includes 6 issues of Chess Life.
• Scholastic: For those 12 and under. $17 per year, includes 6 issues of Chess Life for Kids.

There will be a $2 affiliate commission available on all of these memberships.

Note that the age limit for the Young Adult membership (which used to be called the Youth membership) has been extended to age 24, so that it should cover most college-age members. Also, the new $19 Youth membership is available up to age 15, previously someone who was 15 would have had to purchase a $25 membership. The age cutoff for the Scholastic membership has been lowered to age 12 and the price has been reduced by $2.

There are two and three year options for all of the above.

Three URLs have been created to facilitate access to MSA data from devices like PDAs and cell phones. They are:

USCF Member Lookup (http://msa.uschess.org/thin.php)

USCF ID Search (http://msa.uschess.org/thin2.php)

http://msa.uschess.org/thin3.php (USCF Member Lookup with parameters in URL only.)

The 'USCF Member Lookup' URL will give you the name, expiration date, status and published ratings for a USCF ID, plus the member's FIDE ID and current FIDE rating, if available. The default is today's date, so it will return the current published rating for someone, but you can enter an earlier date. (You can also call it using the ID you want to look up, eg, msa.uschess.org/thin.php?11111111)

The 'USCF ID Search' URL will let you search for USCF ID's by last name (at least 2 characters required), plus an optional first name and state field.

The third URL is intended for automated queries and requires all data in the URL (using the 'GET' method.) The thin.php and thin3.php URLs will accept both the USCF ID and a cutoff date as part of the URL, eg, msa.uschess.org/thin3.php?11111111;2006-08-01 will give the player's published ratings as of the August 2006 supplement (or earlier.)

The new Online TLA Service is now available. Players can search for upcoming chess tournaments based on dates, geographical restrictions and types of events. Affiliates can enter online TLAs for their upcoming events using the form available in the TD/Affiliate Support Area.

One of the things the new USCF ratings programming has been designed to facilitate is making corrections to events after they have been rated.

Note: The USCF only accepts corrections from the Tournament Director for the event, as the TD is responsible for ensuring the accuracy of the rating report. Players who want to report corrections should contact the TD or the sponsoring affiliate, not the USCF office.

Later this year we hope to give TDs the ability to make corrections to their rated events using a new online editing form. Until such time that the online correction process is available, TDs should send corrections to ratingsmgr@uschess.org.

In order to enter those changes quickly (or if sending corrections to the USCF office), here's a checklist of the information that will be needed:

• The 12 digit USCF event ID and event name.
• The section number and name.
• The players' pairing numbers. (Keep in mind that the pairing numbers as shown on MSA may not match those in the original rating report. We need the original pairing numbers.)
• The players' USCF IDs and names. (Please note: The pairing numbers in our internal records may not match the ones shown on MSA, because the MSA results are in final standings order. If an ID appears more than once in the crosstable, correctly or because of an ID error, you will need to provide enough information, such as the final score or round-by-round results, to uniquely identify the pairing # that needs to be changed.)
• If player IDs need to be changed, list the correct IDs and player names.
• If game results need to be changed, list the results as originally reported and the corrections needed.

If you have Internet access from your tournament site, the USCF's new online facility for TDs, the TD/Affilate Support Area, can be used to help you get your event ready for online submission even while your tournament is still under way. After round 1, create upload files for your event and upload them through TD/A. You'll get back a validation report via e-mail which will show you whether you have any membership issues that could delay when your tournament is ratable. That way you can work on correcting those issues while your players are still present.

There are three reasons for this, and they are all related to problems and complaints about the old ratings system. The complaints we hear most are:

• Why does it take so long to get an event rated?
• Why don't you update your ratings more frequently?
• How do I get an error in one of my events corrected?
• You show me as having played in an event, it wasn't me!

Under the old ratings system we seldom rated events more frequently than once a week. Thus when we would rate several hundred events we could sort them into event-ending order before rating the entire batch and for the most part they wound up in something close to true chronological order.

However, under the new ratings system we are rating events many times every day. (We think that's much better than having events that are ready to rate sit around for perhaps 6 or 7 days until the next time we run a weekly rate.)

So, instead of rating several hundred events at a time we are now rating perhaps a dozen events at a time, sometimes just one. That means that many more events will be rated out of order because of how frequently that we run the ratings program.

In addition, the new online submission procedures have cut weeks off the processing time for events. It is now very possible for a TD to run an event, submit it that evening, and have the results on the website before breakfast! (We've already seen an event get posted to the website within 12 hours of when it ended, that can now be an every day experience.)

While we hope that our system improvements and a staff reorganization will enable us to process rating reports received in the mail much faster, perhaps within a week, there is just no way that events that are mailed to the USCF office can be rated as fast as those submitted online.

We have always received a lot of complaints about events being rated out of order, the new ratings system was designed to solve that problem COMPLETELY by re-rating the events to place them in the order in which they were played regardless of how quickly they get processed and rated.

After complaints about how long it takes for events to get rated (which the new online submission process should fix) and complaints about events rated out of order, the third most frequent complaint about the old ratings system was about errors in events, such as incorrect results or the wrong USCF IDs being used.

The old system was not really designed to facilitate corrections, and some estimates are that 5-10% of all events have at least one error in them that affects the ratings in that event. The new system is designed to make entering corrections much easier, and to place that ability in the hands of the TDs.

However, whenever an event is corrected, that means that the post-event ratings in it change. The only way to properly show the impact of those changes on subsequent events is to re-rate them.

We realize this is a bit confusing, hopefully now that we've explained the reasons why we made the design choices we did you will understand and appreciate them.

As a reminder, all ratings in between ratings supplements are unofficial. That's far more important under the new ratings system than it was under the old system. TDs who have grown accustomed to using the 'most recent' rating from the USCF website for their players may want to consider going back to the procedures recommended in the USCF rulebook and use official published ratings wherever possible, because the 'most recent' ratings that the TD looks up a few days before the event could change several times between then and the morning of the event.

• Update of the ratings in individual member records and the crosstable detail records are not done at the same time or on the same schedule. Thus the most recent rating shown in a member record may not match the rating from his or her most recently rated event, even if there are no events rated out of order, though this time-based discrepancy should only last for a few hours.
• MSA cannot currently display two sets of ratings for the same event, so dual-rated events only show the regular ratings. CORRECTED on 3/5/05
• Please see comments below regarding events that appear to have been rated out of order or events that don't appear to be paying any attention to the post-event rating from your previous event.
• The players in a crosstable are currently shown in the order submitted by the TD, not necessarily in order by points scored.
• A few fields, mostly date fields, were not displaying properly, we think we have this one fixed though there may still be some missing data on a few events.

The new ratings programming will be rating events much more frequently than under the old system, several times a day instead of about once a week. Because of that, the initial rate of each event is a preliminary result because there may be events yet to be rated that should come before that event.

We will be re-rating events periodically, probably about once a week, to put them into the correct chronological order based on event ending dates.

The first of these re-rates will probably take place the weekend of Feb 26-27th.

Once all events have been re-rated to put them into chronological order (based on the event ending date), a player's rating will show the correct impact from one event to the next, as if all of those events had been rated the moment they ended.

There were actually two rate runs on the 14th because the National K-12 championships wasn't ready to rate until later in the day and that's an event that many people have been eagerly anticipating seeing rated. However, because it was rated after some other events, even though they ended on a later date, it is out of chronological order.

In most cases we try to use as the pre-event rating for an event the post-event rating from the latest event that ended before that event, not the most recently rated event regardless of event ending dates. This is especially true of the K-12, which uses player's ratings from early December even though several hundred events that were held since then have already been rated.

We realize that this new way of handling events will cause some confusion, especially at first, but we want to make it clear that the results that are shown initially are preliminary. Official published ratings should be used by TDs wherever possible. At this point, those are still the ratings from the February Supplement, which was prepared nearly a month ago (several weeks before the K-12 was ready to rate). The next set of published ratings will not be finalized until early March.

MSA does not yet have the ability to show whether the ratings for an event have been updated since that event was initially rated, that capability is being added to MSA.

That site is no longer being updated or supported by the USCF.

All of the capabilities of that site are either part of the TD/Affiliate Support area or MSA or should be included in the next release of MSA. (See below.)

The USCF expresses its thanks to Alan Losoff for setting up the individual ratings site and maintaining it for the benefit of USCF members over the years.

Please report problems to msafeedback@uschess.org.

Your question may already be answered in the Frequently Asked Questions file.

Thank you!