The Ratings Committee has been holding a steady course while
waiting for the USCF office to be ready to implement the new
rating system and the Life Achievement Awards system.
Several minor issues that have come up during the past year,
such as improving the Quick Chess rating system (which
was discussed at greater length last year) and alternatives
to money floors based on ratings, were generally thought by
the Committee to be issues to examine after the new rating
system is implemented.  The Committee felt that if the
problems still existed, the nature of the problem would be
more appropriately addressed in the context of the new
system.  The following are the main issues examined this
past year.

The Policy Board charged the Committee to consider whether
tournament directors could be allowed to use ratings
appearing on the USCF web server assuming they gave players
enough advance notice.  The consensus opinion appears to be
that tournament directors should be allowed to make use of
interim ratings as they see fit.  One anticipated concern 
was that it would be a poor practice to let players
have the option of choosing to use their official rating or
an interim one.  However, it was clarified that the specific
issue would require tournament directors announcing in advance (e.g.,
a TLA in Chess Life) the use of the most current, albeit
unofficial, ratings.  This is no different from the accepted
practice of using unofficial ratings on mailing labels 
in tournament pairings in place of official ratings.

The Committee was charged with advising the Task Force on 
operational changes needed for the USCF to incorporate ratings 
into web-based technology.  Specifically, the Task Force was
curious about the Committee's views on whether individual
ratings could be posted daily on the USCF's web server,
whether an online rating system could be developed, and whether
fees for processing online ratings should be different from
over-the-board ratings.  In response, the Committee noted that 
ratings are processed weekly so that daily updates on the
web server would only make sense if ratings were to be
calculated more frequently.  The Committee expressed
preference towards not moving in this direction.  The
Committee unanimously agreed that implementing a rating
system for playing online games was straightforward, noting
that several online rating systems already exist.  Regarding
fees for rating online games, the Committee felt that this
was an issue to be taken up by the USCF office.

The Committee has fine-tuned the new ratings algorithm in
preparation for its implementation.  There were several
specific details that were addressed.  First, in the earlier form of
the algorithm, the method for rating unrated players who
competed against other unrated players could result in unintended 
consequences.  This problem was fixed in the updated
algorithm.  Secondly, the system did not distinguish between
half-K and full-K events.  This omission was addressed by
defining the values of K in the standard rating formula to
depend on the type of event (half-K versus full-K).  Also, 
for half-K events, the overall game counter is incremented
only 0.5 per game.  Finally, the rating floor description
and separation of quick chess ratings and regular ratings
were clarified in the description.  The Committee plans
to accompany this technical document with another document
that provides players with simple formulas that will
approximate the actual algorithm.

The Committee was also asked by Mike Cavallo about the order
in which games should be rated under the new rating system.
Currently, events are rated in the order they are received
by the USCF office.  The drawback of this approach, and the
reason this issue was raised, is that if a tournament
director is late in submitting a tournament report, the
rating system in effect gives more weight to the game
outcomes in this event compared to more recently played  
events in determining a current rating.  The simple solution 
of rating events in the order they are played was 
proposed.  This would involve rerating all events from 
the starting date of a tournament using all the saved
tournament information in the database.  This suggestion met 
with some opposition:  The downside of rating events in 
the order they are played is that players may see their 
rating changing despite not playing - this could happen if 
competing against an opponent who played in an event that 
had a tournament report submitted late.  Furthermore, it was 
pointed out that in the overwhelming majority of cases, the 
differences in ratings that result from rating events in order 
played compared to the order received was practically negligible.  
While the Committee has not agreed upon a particular solution, 
the consensus was that the new rating system be implemented 
with enough flexibility to allow for the possibility of 
rating events in the order they were played.  Variants 
of the "order played" approach were suggested, including 
methods where ratings are updated as reports are received, 
but periodically (every two months, or every year) a 
complete re-rating would take place.  The Committee plans 
to finalize these details before the system is implemented.

Additionally, the Committee recommends that the Delegates adopt
the following Committee motion:

ADM:  The delegates authorize the change in required number
of games to achieve the Life Expert title in the Life
Achievement Award system from 200 to 250.  The proposal upon which
the delegates voted at last year's meeting contained a
typographical error, and this motion merely intends to fix the
error.