Ian Thompson wrote:Alex Holowczak wrote:I think letting an ineligible player play in a tournament, and then disqualifying them afterwards, would be an excellent way for potential entries to lose confidence in your event.
You wouldn't be doing that. I thought the suggestion was that players' eligibility for rating prizes based on relative rating performance should be based on highest rating in the last 6 months or a year. That would be separate from being eligible to play in the tournament which would remain determined by current rating.
Perhaps I've misunderstood. I thought the suggestion was to be used even to determine eligibility. That's certainly what I thought Nick Faulks implied when he made the suggestion.
Alex Holowczak wrote:I don't know enough about what happened in the Blackpool event, where they retrospectively decided a player was ineligible, but I'd be keen to avoid going to court at the end of a tournament having disqualified them even if I did win the case.
That was different. The organisers let someone play in a tournament based on an estimated rating and then decided they shouldn't have done. Rating prizes are usually restricted to rated players only, so no estimates are involved. If you do allow unrated players to win these prizes then you have to estimate their rating and there is no actual rating to get wrong.[/quote]
Often you have to "estimate their rating" using something that isn't their rating. E.g. a standardplay rating in a Rapidplay. And two different sources: ECF or FIDE. In my tournaments, anyone I can give a number to by way of an estimate is eligible for a rating prize. This makes sense to me - if we're using the number for pairing purposes, they should be eligible for the prizes that that estimate will give them.
But these estimates aren't really estimates, they're "other" ratings. So now do I need to look up all their Rapidplay ratings as well as Standardplay ratings...