Ratings information for tournament organisers

Download rating.dat (right-click)

Recently processed

Download PratCooker ratings software.

This page puts together the information that a tournament organiser needs before and after running a tournament.

Receiving entries

As you receive entries, you will want to know ratings of players in order to place them in an appropriate section and to seed them within a section.

To check ratings, start typing the name:

Provisional ratings: If the player has fewer than 50 rated games, the number of games is indicated. Their rating is still uncertain. You are entitled to use your judgement together with the indicated rating to assign them to a section.

Mouldy ratings: If the player hasn't played in the last five years, we may have them listed here, but the date of last play is indicated e.g. "from 20030304". Please let the National Ratings Officer know, because the rating must be adjusted by a formula in this case. Some of the players from many years ago might not even be in the list of suggestions. See below.

Unfound: If you cannot find a player, it may be:

a misspelt name e.g. sometimes Margaret may be Meg or Peg.
a player from long ago. The National Ratings Officer may be able to help.
a player who has changed their name eg by marriage. Please let the NRO know.
a genuine new player. We sometimes use the word "novice" in this case, but in fact they may have experience from overseas, or even from local internet based play. It is up to you to make enquiries in order to place them in an appropriate section. The rating system should make a good estimate of rating, no matter what section they are placed in, but it is better for the player, the other competitors and the rating system if they are placed in a section where they will neither be trounced nor far too good.

Get the ratings data file.

This is an optional step. Many tournament organisers like to process the ratings unofficially after the tournament. A really easy way to do this is to use a USB stick for two way communication. The data file for this is rating.dat, and you can check whether it is sufficiently up to date by inspecting the processing status in the box at the top of this page. If there are no pending tournaments that might affect your players, right-click the link at the top of this page to save the link as rating.dat on your USB stick. If you haven't already got it, also download the PratCooker program which stays on your USB stick to process ratings. See later.

While the tournament is in progress you should check that names are correctly spelt, names may be checked against those in RATING.DAT using the check spelling menu item . At the end of the tournament you should clean up any markers like @12 or @R or (N) that you may have included. The AUPAIR program has a menu item to Clean. Open the PratCooker program directly from the USB stick. It will guide you to find where you stored the TOU file on the tournament laptop (hint: use an easily findable working directory for your laptop work directory) and it will then copy the TOU file to the USB stick, run the ratings, and display them. Please check whether players flagged as being novices are really novices and not merely a misspelling.

If you don't use the PratCooker program you should at least copy the TOU file onto the USB stick ready to send to the National Ratings Officer, barry.harridge@gmail.com.

When you get home

If you ran the PratCooker program from the USB stick, the USB stick will contain a file e.g. 09camb.txt which can be opened with eg NotePad. It looks something like this:

Results and ratings: 31.05.2009 Scamander Div 2 Sun
DIVISION 2
       W     M                       Old  Chg  New
  1    5  +283 Maureen Harris        927  +21  948
  2    5  +270 Blitz Greig           990  +17 1007
  3    5  +268 Kate Larby            756  +47  803
  4    5  +134 Dawn Boyle            909  +24  933
  5    5  +104 Maree Swanson         911  +13  924
  6    4   +46 Etty Meerding         844   +3  847
  7    3  +130 Maree Hodgetts        855  -18  837
  8    3  +122 Nina Clarke           941  -26  915
  9    3  -149*Tash Page                       718
 10    3  -162 Eileen Koops          880  -15  865
 11    1  -615^Darrel Keep           500       500
 12    0  -431 David Petrovic        586  -45  541
High game Blitz Greig 2437
High word Dawn Boyle TWEEZERS 128

Please check that any player flagged (by an asterisk) as a novice is not merely a misspelling. You can copy and paste this report into an email message to anounce placings and rating changes to the ozscrabble mailing list. The USB stick will also have the TOU file, eg 09camb.tou which should be emailed to the National Ratings Officer for official processing.

The PratCooker program is designed to be quick and easy to use from a USB stick. By contrast, the program used by the National Rating Officer is more difficult to use (it requires working at a DOS prompt, with all required files in one place). The NRO's program is called plinrat, and more details are available here.

Please inform the National Rating Officer if there were any unusual dealings, eg coping with byes or dropouts.

Last updated 15 June 2009