Who should submit reports?
Normally the tournament controller (the person who runs the pairings program and inputs results) but it can be anyone nominated by the tournament organisers as long as the person understands their responsibilities (as set out here) and have a login for this site with permission to submit reports. There is a list of current reporters in Contacts.
When should reports be submitted?
Ideally, as soon as possible after the tournament has finished. The new rating system has the ability to rate a tournament as soon as the report has been submitted. The most significant factor preventing it from being a live system is the delay between the end of the tournament and reception of the report (plus time for resolving issues, if there are any).
In August 2013 the ICU executive unanimously endorsed a proposal for a maximum of one week between the end of a tournament and submission of the report (unless there are exceptional circumstances). This applies to all tournaments including long running leagues where there is plenty of time to prepare most of the report before the tournament ends. Note that this is in accord with FIDE's regulations (see 9.1).
Who is responsible for the quality of data in the report?
As far as the rating officer is concerned, the reporter is responsible. Sometimes, however, the various tasks involved in running a tournament are shared between different people. A common scenario, for example, is a director who collects player data (name, ICU number, DOB, federation) and a controller who runs the tournament, collects results and reports to the rating officer.
In such cases the reporter needs to ensure that other members of the team know what data to collect and to draw their attention to any issues that arise so that they can be resolved before the report is submitted. Examples of issues would be an ICU member without an ID, a non-member without a DOB or federation or a foreign player without a rating or federation.
What information is required in reports?
Tournament name and start date, end date, player names and results, and:
- ICU numbers for all players already in the rating database
- Federation and rating (preferably FIDE, otherwise equivalent Elo) for foreign guests
- Federation, gender and date of birth for any players new to the ICU
Federations are normally specified by their 3-letter codes.
Use the formula FIDE = ECF × 7.5 + 700 when converting ECF ratings to equivalent Elo. Prior to 1st Jan 2014 the formula was slightly different (FIDE = ECF × 8 + 650). See Wikipedia article.
For USCF ratings use these formulae (from Glickman and Estima, 2015):
- if USCF < 2000 then FIDE = USCF − 180 / 0.94
- if USCF ≥ 2000 then FIDE = USCF − 20 / 1.02
In events that have been confirmed as "youth" events the following formulae should be used;
- if USCF < 2000 then FIDE = USCF − 560 / 0.76
- if USCF ≥ 2000 then FIDE = USCF − 80 / 1.0
For USCF ratings whose conversions equate to zero or a negitive integer the rating value of 100 should be used.
Federation, gender and DOB for new players (non-members) are desirable but not absolutely required. They are only needed in order to backtrack a player's rating to before the time they became an ICU member. Current policy is that this is normally not done but we will consider requests to do so on a case-by-case basis.
Other desirable (but not required) bits of information are: round dates, tie-break rules, time control, arbiter's name, assistant arbiter's name and location.
What resources are available to help correctly identify ICU players?
Tournament reporters need to identify players by their ICU ID if they have one. Here are some ways to find out a player's ID:
- Information supplied by the player in the entry form
- Player data files, available from Downloads, that can be searched by name in SwissPerfect and SwissManager
- Before a tournament is uploaded to this site: ICU Player Search
- After a tournament is uploaded: player matching (and editing) facilities for reporters
What file formats do the ICU support for reports?
- SwissPerfect
- FIDE-Krause (the format used to submit tournament reports to FIDE)
- ICU-CSV (for individual players in foreign tournaments only)
The first two are normally created with specialised applications (see below) while for the last format either a spreadsheet application or a text editor can be used.
Swiss Perfect is a binary format so can't be created with an editor but Krause is plain text and if you don't have a specialised application it is possible (though a bit fiddly, as the data has to line up in columns) to use an editor. There's a sample Krause file in the Downloads section with helpful comments to show where the columns are.
How should reports be submitted?
The reporter should log in to this web site and perform the following steps:
- Upload a results file in one of the supported formats
- If the upload succeeds:
- Edit the tournament and/or player data to resolve problems (if there are any)
- Update the tournament stage to "Ready" once all issues have been dealt with
- If the upload fails:
- Correct the problem indicated by the error message and try again
- If necessary, ask the rating officer for help or email the files to him/her
Do the popular tournament apps have any quirks I should be aware of?
- Unlike FIDE-Krause, has no way to represent tournament start and end dates. Specify them in the upload form.
SwissManager (has support for FIDE-Krause format but with some oddities):
Does not allow blank ID numbers and they must contain a minimum of 4 digits. A work around is to prepend a letter (e.g. "N0001", "N0002" etc.) for new ICU players or foreign guests which this site will treat as blanks. FIDE ID numbers can also be used for foreign guests which, because they are much larger, cannot be confused with ICU numbers.
Unlike SwissPerfect, has only one slot for ratings. If you want to indicate whether ratings in a file are ICU or FIDE, then use the menu in the upload form. Note: ratings only need to be reported for foreign guests and in this case they should be FIDE ratings (or appropriately converted foreign Elo ratings).