We’ll be announcing the details of the upcoming 2008 event soon. It’ll be on milwaukeechess.org if I can keep enough interruptions at bay to finish the redesign there. (I’ve been having to clean up a lot of crap from a group of West African spammers/script kiddies lately, so I’m farther behind than usual on my pro bono projects.)

Can you give some infomation on the “Milwaukee City Champion”

Is this a rated event?

When and where is it held?

Again, thanks for the support! It really keeps me going when I am down or have a rough patch.

I don’t use the unofficial ratings because they are generally susceptible to frequent rerating, making the number dependent upon the precise moment I request the data. The official rating is less susceptible to rerates.

2006-11-26 200611265331 NATIONAL CHESS CONGRESS (PA) 1: NCCPR 2063 => 2069

Interesting that Joynt is playing again. Looking forward to seeing him again; it’s been a long time since we’ve played. I wonder if he’s changed much?

After all, it’s not as if minor (less than 100 points) fluctuations in a rating are meaningful for anything except ego-boo. (I still remember Elo remarking wistfully that if he’d has his way, ratings would be two digits, not four, because rating differences less than 100 — and probably even 200 — points were within the range of human inconsistency, meaning it’s not at all unusual for a player to play up to 100 points or more above or below their rating simply because they’re human.)

Ivan, The USChess link you provide is useless for my purposes, as it includes players like Mike Wierzbicki, who won’t be playing OTB chess anytime soon (2 tournaments in the last decade, 10 since 1991). In fact, of the top 10 players on that list, only 5 played a rated game between 1 Dec 2006 and 1 Dec 2007, the period used by my current list. (While I’m reasonably certain 9 of the top 10 players in the USCF list are still alive, I haven’t heard anything from Dr. Angos, #9 on their list, for so long that it’s possible he isn’t. It took the USCF over a decade to catch up with the deaths of Marshall Rohland and Henry Meifert, for example.) It’s far simpler to just request a custom rating list from the USCF, get it by return email, and take that file into a local application for filtering, sorting, etc. Total process takes 1-2 hours; as I noted it’d be easier if automated, but USCF won’t let me write a custom query for the ratings DB, so manual it remains.

And I don’t include Erik on my list because technically he’s still a TX player (and will be until he notifies the USCF of the change). I take that stand in order to be fair; I know I can’t catch up with every player’s change of address myself, so I only acknowledge the “official” changes rather than including players I happen to know but not others whose only crime is to have avoided coming to my attention. A line has to be drawn somewhere, and since there are good arguments to be made in favor of both positions, I selfishly choose the one which requires less work.

Ivan, the only real differences between your table and the one I had already posted are the inclusion of Joynt and Santarius (Joynt will be in my next list, as he played after 12/1, and I’ve already explained Santarius) my inclusion of A. Vayserberg, which you don’t for some reason, my inclusion of Burton, because of his Action chess activity which you apparently don’t count, your inclusion of Thet (who again played after my list’s cutoff) my erroneous inclusion of Jerry Jones (I hurried the process and missed one, it appears) and your inclusion of Yusim and Colak (I don’t include provisional ratings, but perhaps I should). A total of seven differences out of 71 players, two of which are because of time frame, and four more because of different standards for who should (or shouldn’t) make the list. Leaving out the ones caused by different standards, a total of three changes out of 71 is hardly big enough to warrant the work of putting out a new list.

This “top player” list doesn’t change as often as you and Ashish seem to think it does. There weren’t all that many changes between this list and the previous list, dated August, even. I don’t understand why you seem to think it should be updated weekly or daily or hourly or whatever. It’s a pretty static list. It’s possible I’m the most volatile player on it, going from somewhere around #50 on the previous one to #89 on the current one to an expectation of #60, give or take a little, on the next one (I’ll know more when I get the final data for it).

I’m not likely to be as detailed in a comment again for a long while. The time it’s taken to address this issue (which has nothing whatsoever to do with the post it’s attached to) means that at least two other posts to this site will not get written for a while, if ever, because I’ve used up their time to research and write this.

http://gettingto2000.blogspot.com/2007/12/wisconsins-top-players.html