Armstrong Cup 2017/2018

Tim Harding

cdeb wrote: »

Trinity v St Benildus B was moved at the start of the season because Trinity don't have a midweek venue.

The ratings are very easy to find on the LCU site - it's in the list of every declared squad, and the ratings don't change throughout the season. So the 150-point rule is very easy for captains to navigate in that regards.

Whether those ratings are in fact correct, as per pdemp's post, is a separate matter.

Well, as you pointed out in the O'Hanlon thread, according to the declared list of Trinity ratings, the difference between Luke Scott and me is 129 points (though earlier it had briefly been 190) so why is LimitLess claiming that Trinity will be penalised because our captain played Luke ahead of me in the Elm Mount match?
Is LimitLess one of the league controllers?

And I just heard on the grapevine that Trinity-Benildus B is supposed to be on this Saturday afternoon.

cdeb

As I said, it is easy to work out the 150-point gap if the ratings on the site are correct - so your suggestion that the 150-point rule be done away with because they ratings are hard to find doesn't stack up.

However, the ratings on the site should be correct. The point is being argued that they are not, based on the league's rule 6.8.a.1, which calls for "the latest ICU rating published prior to the commencement of the current season" to be used. There may have been an extant live list which was used to populate the LCU site data instead.

Trinity v Benildus B is this Saturday, subject to weather. It's quite possible it'll have to be put back a week.

Retd.LoyolaCpt

For reference - published ratings are here: https://ratings.icu.ie/icu_ratings. The history of TH vs LS rating diff based on published ICU ratings (ratings lists are published at the end of the month - ie Aug '17 = 31/Aug/17). I'm not sure where the published 1807 rating for LS came from on the LCU site. Peak rating 1785 over this time-frame.

190 Jan '18
181 Dec '17
181 Nov '17
147 Oct '17
161 Sep '17
194 Aug '17
213 July '17
151 June '17
151 May '17

As someone who has played their way up through the divisions for the last few years, I understand Tim's preference to play O'H rather than Armstrong.

FYI, Gonzaga vs Benildus A (meant to be tonight) officially postponed.

cdeb

Retd.LoyolaCpt wrote: »

I'm not sure where the published 1807 rating for LS came from on the LCU site.

Just had a look on the ratings site there; it was never his live rating at any stage, and indeed it was never his FIDE rating either.

I tried just now to "register" Luke for the Benildus Armstrong B team, and the system returns his rating at 1807. So this is largely a system error, and certainly Trinity should be shown a large degree of leniency here in my view.

That said, the captain should have had a list of the ratings when declaring the teams, and would have seen the error from that, so Trinity have a certain element of responsibility too.

L1m1tless

The ratings on the LCU are incorrect. If Drogheda are penalised for this error then so should other teams be.
It's quite harsh but either no teams are penalised or all are.

After all, it's the same rules we all play by.

Rathminor

Tim Harding wrote: »

Well, as you pointed out in the O'Hanlon thread, according to the declared list of Trinity ratings, the difference between Luke Scott and me is 129 points (though earlier it had briefly been 190) so why is LimitLess claiming that Trinity will be penalised because our captain played Luke ahead of me in the Elm Mount match?
Is LimitLess one of the league controllers?

And I just heard on the grapevine that Trinity-Benildus B is supposed to be on this Saturday afternoon.

Tim,
Following up on the thread that started on the Ennis section; the instance I had noticed was between Alexiei and Anthony.
I hadn’t noticed the Luke/Tim separate instance

Rathminor

Rathmines v Dun Laoghaire has now been postponed from the 1st March and will now be played on the 15th March

Tim Harding

The 1936 was probably my correct ICU rating mid-September, as I lost a few points early in the month in the City of Dublin Challengers. Luke was in the same event but I don't know whether he gained points or lost them.
It looks to me as if live ratings immediately post the City of Dublin were used - understandable as this was a big set of tournaments played just before the leagues began.

The decision that I would play the O'Hanlon this year was taken in May when we expected to have Karl, as well as Ioana and Jacob Miller playing regularly for the Armstrong, and Luke was interested in joining. As the 2nd team had just won their second promotion and would need an extra player it made a lot of sense.
From a point of view of maintaining my rating of course it makes no sense, as if I don't win a game I lose loads of rating points (except against Manuel Gardenes of Gorey) while if I win I only get a point or three. But at this stage it's only my FIDE rating I care about (as it affects pairings when I play abroad).

I may play one more season for TCD 2nd team but if we get promoted to the Ennis I will probably stop.
After many years of playing board 1 or 2 I don't much enjoy going out on cold evenings or Saturday afternoons to put my FIDE rating at stake in often poor playing conditions.

cdeb

Rathminor wrote: »

Tim,
Following up on the thread that started on the Ennis section; the instance I had noticed was between Alexiei and Anthony.
I hadn’t noticed the Luke/Tim separate instance

This match here, just for clarification. That does look clear cut alright, assuming it's correct.

I'll merge in the stuff from the Ennis thread now.

cdeb

L1m1tless wrote: »

If Drogheda are penalised for this error then so should other teams be.
It's quite harsh but either no teams are penalised or all are.

This is true. Though was the Drogheda player not showing up as no rating earlier in the season? That's at least harder to see. Maybe I'm imagining that though.

If the ratings were simply wrong on the LCU site, then I'd argue leniency to an extent for Drogheda (as for Trinity), but they (as Trinity) have to take some blame for not spotting the error themselves (especially as, in Drogheda's case, the player in question got his rating playing in the Drogheda Congress)

bduffy

cdeb wrote: »

This is true. Though was the Drogheda player not showing up as no rating earlier in the season? That's at least harder to see. Maybe I'm imagining that though.

If the ratings were simply wrong on the LCU site, then I'd argue leniency to an extent for Drogheda (as for Trinity), but they (as Trinity) have to take some blame for not spotting the error themselves (especially as, in Drogheda's case, the player in question got his rating playing in the Drogheda Congress)

When we played on Feb 3rd he had no rating on the Leinster Leagues site, but was about 1730 on the ICU list. This is what was recorded on the scoresheet on the day.....as being 1730 or so. Then about two weeks ago his rating came up at 1900+ on the website. I only noticed it as it was on my scoresheet.

Ciaran

Retd.LoyolaCpt wrote: »

I'm not sure where the published 1807 rating for LS came from on the LCU site.

Probably, an old tournament that Luke Scott played in was submitted or rated late and all the ratings after that were changed after the LCU list was put together.

It's unreasonable to expect team captains to go by anything other than the ratings listed on the leinsterchess site when judging board order. If the ratings there are wrong or out of date, there should be no penalty for any board order issues that occurred because of relying on them.

Tim Harding

Ciaran wrote: »

Probably, an old tournament that Luke Scott played in was submitted or rated late and all the ratings after that were changed after the LCU list was put together.

It's unreasonable to expect team captains to go by anything other than the ratings listed on the leinsterchess site when judging board order. If the ratings there are wrong or out of date, there should be no penalty for any board order issues that occurred because of relying on them.

Quite. I shall be very annoyed if we lose a point over the match I was involved in because I was certainly not asking for a lower board; indeed I did not want to play that match at all and took a very quick draw.

We don't want situations where the title, medal positions and relegation could be decided on cases like this and Gonzaga's, do we?

cdeb

There seems to be 3 separate issues here, all slightly different.

1 - Drogheda. Why did the player have no rating on the LCU site? Only reason I can think of is that Drogheda didn't realise he already had an ICU number, and instead declared him as a new player. That would be their fault, I think. It's possible this only arose during a tidy-up of the ratings, and a match-off of duplicate names.
2 - Trinity (a). Why is Luke down as 1807? If it's because that was his rating, and then a late tournament was rated, causing the September list to be republished, then Trinity can hardly expect to be penalised.
3 - Trinity (b). This - the Alex/Anthony swap - appears clear-cut unless the result is recorded incorrectly, and Trinity should be docked points, with Benildus A gaining.

pdemp

cdeb wrote: »

There seems to be 3 separate issues here, all slightly different.

1 - Drogheda. Why did the player have no rating on the LCU site? Only reason I can think of is that Drogheda didn't realise he already had an ICU number, and instead declared him as a new player. That would be their fault, I think. It's possible this only arose during a tidy-up of the ratings, and a match-off of duplicate names.

He wasn't registered until Sept, therefore had no ICU number or rating prior to then, so FIDE -> other national -> captain's judgement comes into play.


City of Dublin or other September events not relevant for league start per rules (latest published rating) since the move to monthly lists v the old 3 lists per year. Aug list is the relevant list if published on site before start of leagues in mid Sept. However on occasion it appears the list may be published later than the end of the month. e.g. the Oct' 17 list wasn't publish on 31 Oct, but sometime after Nov 22 (https://web.archive.org/web/20171122172621/https://ratings.icu.ie/icu_ratings shows the Sept list as the published list at that time). So while Oct '17 is an appropriate name for the list (all events up to end of Oct in official rating), the publishing of the original rating with published date would be very helpful. I'm not sure whether the July or August list was the most recent one published on Sept 16 last year, I only used the LCU player declaration forms to check ratings, but they corresponded to the July list at the time.

Tim Harding

Monthly rating lists are an ICU aspiration not a reality, it seems to me. Actual monthly lists seem to have been replaced by "live" ratings which are useless for this purpose as you don't have a set date on which everyone has a new valid publicly available rating.

ICU has also been frequently been behind schedule submitting results for FIDE rating this season, though whether this is (in some cases) due to not getting league results on time/in correct format I am unsure. I do appreciate that dealing with ratings is tedious and technical, not a job many people can do, but I think there are problems with the way things are being done at present.

For next season I definitely think league results should be sent to FIDE after round 5, not pairing it with round 6 because that is not played for another two months - unless my other suggestion of playing round 6 before Christmas (as used to be the case) is adopted.

cdeb

pdemp wrote: »

He wasn't registered until Sept, therefore had no ICU number or rating prior to then, so FIDE -> other national -> captain's judgement comes into play.

Non members still have a rating though; you can see this by simply logging on to the ratings site.

The player in question is on the September ratings list as well, as 1929.

It seems the only issue is whether the list was republished at any time

pdemp

cdeb wrote: »

Non members still have a rating though;

Not according to Retd.LoyolaCpt, see Ennis thread.

cdeb wrote: »

The player in question is on the September ratings list as well, as 1929.

But the Sept list is irrelevant for the leagues (earliest published date is Sept 30, well after leagues start).

There has been a monthly list since Oct 2015.

cdeb

Fair enough on the rating list date; he's not on the August list alright.

There is a viewable rating assigned to the player though, albeit for the purposes of rating other players. It's not a rating in the sense that he hadn't registered with the ICU, but it also is a rating, which was used as the basis for his subsequent games. So, when is a rating not a rating? I think this is something that needs clarification as, while I can see how it happened, it will surely happen again.

[Ignore the rest of what I had written; it related to the cups, not the leagues]

cdeb

Trinity 5.5-2.5 St Benildus B

L1m1tless

Here's one for cdeb to enjoy :P

Dublin 7 curragh 1

Tim Harding

Any more results from yesterday?

I believe Trinity sent out a very weak team to Bray/Greystones, including one of our second team players on board 4 (!?) who will play his O'Hanlon game next week.

And Bray defaulted the board! IMHO they should pay his expenses.

Defaulting when you are the home team is particularly neglectful and hard to understand.

Because Diarmuid left early when the hour was up, he cannot tell us the other results.

cdeb

Ironic that Tim is now effectively arguing for fines for defaults!

On a vaguely similar note though, Kilkenny 7-1 St Benildus A, because we were missing 5 players and found subs almost impossible to get because (a) we have a B team and (b) there was a clash with the schools finals. I imagine Kilkenny had a full team as it was their annual dinner afterwards. Though we did just about manage to get 8 players together.

Tim Harding

I am not arguing for fines in general (payable to league funds) but when it is the HOME team that defaults, the player(s) whose time is wasted and who had to pay train/bus fares should be compensated. Especially if it's a trek out to Bray or other non-central venues.

The whole Armstrong seems to be a mockery this year, not just the defaults/walkovers/freak results, but starting with the fixture list that has Round 10 matches spread between 10 March and 11 April. It was similar with the O'Hanlon which originally gave Trinity no matches at all in March (during term) and round 10 in April when students are preparing for exams.

I hope the LCU can produce a more sensible fixture list next season. If a computer is churning out the list, then it should be reviewed by a few sets of human eyes before publication.

cdeb

OK, a financial penalty of some sort.

But I still think there's an inconsistency between wanting a fine here (return DART fare from town for a student is €2.80) and "strongly objecting" to a fine for defaulting an entire match's worth of games. You can't argue that your player has been inconvenienced while ignoring the inconvenience your team has caused other clubs.

I agree that, where possible, a home default should be signalled in advance obviously (allowing for some unfortunate cases where a player genuinely forgets).

Rathminor

Dun Laoghaire 2.5 Balbriggan 5.5

Tim Harding

I hear Trinity won 4.5-3.5 with the new subs doing well, and I suppose Bray will lose one of those points because of the default.

cdeb

Did bray declare a board 8?

Tim Harding

cdeb wrote: »

Did bray declare a board 8?

No idea; I have not any information about individual boards (except what I said already about Diarmuid's opponent not turning up). I was playing on the O'Hanlon team.
I expect that postponements caused by the snow caused several clubs to have an extra match on the day, stretching resources.

cdeb

OK; I presumed you knew more when you said you supposed Bray would be docked a point for the bottom board. (Trinity would be close on relegated if walkovers were deducted as well as defaults)