Pairing Software and ECF Grading Submission File

[Roger de Coverly]

In my case a fake DOB or an ECF code instead of a FIDE ID works fine.

The ECF code consists of six numbers and a letter. The letter is what's known as a checksum which exists to validate the six numbers. It's an old trick dating back at least to the 1970s which appears to have been used when the BCF started allocating grading codes back in the mid 1980s.

Personally I've never felt the need to reverse engineer the method thus being able to generate "fake" grading codes, but presumably there are those who have. That said, perhaps the systems have been modified to do a genuine look up against all known allocated codes. That's unlikely unless you know that the Master Grading list has been downloaded and installed or that the program is able to login and read it.

[Michael Flatt]

Thanks, Adam. A very kind offer. My county grader, Steve, is awaiting my promised input.

I was mulling over various tricks and fudges to get it to output something. I settled on one similar to that suggested by Ian Thompson. I was going to substitute the details of known registered players and edit the resulting submission file with the correct names of players.

The actual error that comes up is "missing ECF Club" and that stops it dead. It caused me great frustration that it didn't output anything that I could use.

Fortunately, Angus French came to the rescue with his suggestion of copying from the preview window and pasting into a text file. Clearly, he had encountered the same problem and found the solution. It is by far the simplest fix. The program author didn't offer any solution despite taking my money.

It was a Junior event and there were a significant number of ungraded players.

I had wrongly assumed that submitting tournaments for grading was a trivial procedure. Not so when you encounter it for the first time. I'll have to put it down to experience.

It is heartening that so many on the forum are willing to help. My experience is quite the reverse of what others claim happens here.

Thank you all.

[Roger de Coverly]

The actual error that comes up is "missing ECF Club" and that stops it dead.

That should be fairly simple to deal with. There's a four character code which represents a player's club. If they don't have one, there are a number of geographical or semi geographical codes that can be substituted. Herts Juniors is code 3300. Hertfordshire as a place is 0630. Barnet as a place is 3505 etc

Just try geographical names in the ECF grading site and try "club search".

[Michael Flatt]

The actual error that comes up is "missing ECF Club" and that stops it dead.

That should be fairly simple to deal with. There's a four character code which represents a player's club. If they don't have one, there are a number of geographical or semi geographical codes that can be substituted. Herts Juniors is code 3300. Hertfordshire as a place is 0630. Barnet as a place is 3505 etc

Just try geographical names in the ECF grading site and try "club search".

Thanks, Roger. If I were the program developer with access to the code it would all be very simple. Encountering these unexpected problems in commercial software would normally have caused me to write my own program to process the data in a way that suits me. The only difficulty that I had was not knowing the required data format of the ECF grading submission file. Having now seen what the format is I could have saved myself £50. It would have been a trivial problem to reformat the tournament results into the correct format.

I am a tournament controller, not a registered ECF grader, and my only goal was to pass on something to an ECF grader that would cause him the minimum work. It seems to me that regular tournament controllers do become official ECF graders and have access to the Master Grading List. I had not wanted to do that.

There is no guidance or help file provided with UTU Swiss and it involves a fair amount of experimentation to get the software to do anything. The fix suggested by Angus was the only piece of information that I was lacking. If I had written the program I would have ensured that it would have written out the grading submission file with embedded warning messages or with warning messages in a separate log file. It is unacceptable for commercial software to prevent the purchaser outputting his data.

My only reason for purchasing the program was to reformat the data. If I had had the technical specification of the ECF submission file I could submitted my results to the grader without wasting all my time (and money).

[Reg Clucas]

The only difficulty that I had was not knowing the required data format of the ECF grading submission file. Having now seen what the format is I could have saved myself £50.

The ECF grader could have advised you of the required format.

[Peter Finn]

Michael - we have managed to address the issue that you raise and successfully submit the file for grading.
When we did that (pre the latest update for UTU Swiss) we found that just routinely adding a new player didn't work as we couldn't successfully update the club field (required to export for grading).

However if you click on the master list picture and then enter details of the player - you only need to enter names, gender, club and for a junior date of birth. Then you need to click on the player in the player list and press update. You do have to fill in the club field - potentially with a default (in Sussex i believe we generally use Sussex Congresses for that) if the player does not have a club. Then you can submit the file for grading.

It is possible reading the issues addressed in the latest update of UTU that it has addressed the issue described above.

Peter

[Michael Flatt]

Michael - we have managed to address the issue that you raise and successfully submit the file for grading.
When we did that (pre the latest update for UTU Swiss) we found that just routinely adding a new player didn't work as we couldn't successfully update the club field (required to export for grading).

However if you click on the master list picture and then enter details of the player - you only need to enter names, gender, club and for a junior date of birth. Then you need to click on the player in the player list and press update. You do have to fill in the club field - potentially with a default (in Sussex i believe we generally use Sussex Congresses for that) if the player does not have a club. Then you can submit the file for grading.

It is possible reading the issues addressed in the latest update of UTU that it has addressed the issue described above.

Peter

Thanks, Peter. I have now submitted my results to the county grader and await comments back from him.

The easiest course I found was to adopt Angus's suggestion of copying (Ctrl A and Ctrl C) the output listing from the preview window (Submit for ECF grading...) and paste (Ctrl V) into notepad and save as a text file.

I included dates of birth in my player's details but that didn't seem to be sufficient. I wasn't aware (nor does UTU Swiss have any help file) that I could add entries to the imported grading list through the Master icon. The UTU Swiss author never suggested this when I raised this problem with him. I will give it a try

A review of the program update history reveals that creation of the ECF submission file is a continuing issue as there have been numerous updates devoted to it and the ECF Club issue.

It would help if the program was supplied with some documentation regarding its operation or included a FAQ file. If I get time I might write a User Guide myself.

I am still not happy that UTU Swiss baulked at outputting my data as an ECF submission file merely because the developer's decision that data not fully compliant with ECF grading guidelines should not be output.

My data relates to an actual tournament and I expected it to be output even if certain fields were intentionally left blank. How could I submit my data to an ECF grader for comment if I am not permitted to create an output file?

My opinion regarding UTU Swiss might change if it had documentation to assist the User in running it. Would you buy a Ferrari if the ignition key was not supplied and the petrol filler blanked off?

[Adam Raoof]

I am still not happy that UTU Swiss baulked at outputting my data as an ECF submission file merely because the developer's decision that data not fully compliant with ECF grading guidelines should not be output.

My data relates to an actual tournament and I expected it to be output even if certain fields were intentionally left blank. How could I submit my data to an ECF grader for comment if I am not permitted to create an output file?

That's the whole point - any organiser of a tournament is expected to gather the correct information before submitting results to a grader. Date of birth, club, ECF code, FIDE code, nationality ... you get the idea!

[Michael Flatt]

I am still not happy that UTU Swiss baulked at outputting my data as an ECF submission file merely because the developer's decision that data not fully compliant with ECF grading guidelines should not be output.

My data relates to an actual tournament and I expected it to be output even if certain fields were intentionally left blank. How could I submit my data to an ECF grader for comment if I am not permitted to create an output file?

That's the whole point - any organiser of a tournament is expected to gather the correct information before submitting results to a grader. Date of birth, club, ECF code, FIDE code, nationality ... you get the idea!

I gave all the necessary information except their ECF clubs of which the majority have none. I understood that date of birth was sufficient and the program didn't accept that. What do you do if a Junior doesn't have an ECF club. Do you make one up?

I have seen on the ECF grading list that many Juniors are identified as Hertfordshire and simultaneously either Middlesex or Barnet Knights, which is clearly an error. So perhaps, registering an ECF club for a Junior is meaningless.

[Roger de Coverly]

What do you do if a Junior doesn't have an ECF club. Do you make one up?

The long standing convention for all players is that if they don't have, or you don't know a club, you give them a geographic description, such as their county or town of residence. Sometimes an affinity group is used such as xxx Juniors or xxx Congresses. It's to fill in that gap which appears on the detail grading results page. There are numerous four character descriptions available which would have been created during the approaching thirty year lifespan of the current codes.

[Michael Farthing]

Do you need to include an asterisk, Roger?

[Roger de Coverly]

Do you need to include an asterisk, Roger?

The convention is that Maidenhead is a club and Maidenhead* is a place. There are numerous 4 character codes already assigned. The club is 2624 and the place 2936.

For a more generic description, there are codes for Berks Congresses, Berks Primary Schools, Berkshire* and Berkshire Junior.

Someone has found a way of hacking the input to remove clubs, as it's missing from the results in a number of the Congresses that I played in over the past year. A guess is that it's people using the Swiss Master program and converting the FIDE output file, which doesn't have clubs, to an ECF format. For that matter, the ECF grading system may have been tweaked to also accept the FIDE format. That could explain rated events, but not unrated ones.

[Michael Flatt]

The convention is that Maidenhead is a club and Maidenhead* is a place. There are numerous 4 character codes already assigned. The club is 2624 and the place 2936.

For a more generic description, there are codes for Berks Congresses, Berks Primary Schools, Berkshire* and Berkshire Junior.

Thanks, Roger. That's exactly the sort of information that I am lacking. It might be written down somewhere else but I don't recall coming across it before. I am sure that if I had elected to become a registered ECF grader that would have been provided to me.

From Adam's response above he struggles with Swiss Master in the same way I struggle with UTU Swiss. As an organiser submitting a tournament for grading for the first time there is not much guidance available. It takes a lot of trial and error to get to grips with these pairing programs and getting them to output anything at all. Although Swiss Perfect seems to be frowned upon it is by far the simplest and easiest to use. The bells and whistles of more modern programs come at a price (no documentation).

The best resource is this forum and the people that participate in it. Without the kind advice and suggestions above I would still be floundering. As it is, I only have to confirm a couple of dates of birth and then I'm done and dusted!

[Adam Raoof]

Struggled!

Swiss Master is my choice for FIDE rated events, which are also ECF graded. Thanks to a combination of Howard Grist (programming), Alex Holowczak (ingenuity and workarounds), Richard Haddrell (tough love) and Sean Hewitt (top tips and tricks) it is possible for me to grade all my events and submit them for FIDE rating myself, rather than bother an already overworked grader. From doing absolutely no grading, I now grade thousands of games a year!

If anyone wants to grade events and needs an explanation of how the procedure works, it can be quite tricky, but I am happy to offer support. More junior events should be graded, and we do need to make it easier for organisers to gather and process the information, so they can make this possible.