Angus French wrote: ↑Sat Dec 22, 2018 9:59 pm
But is not a greater issue with the idea of monthly grading the fact that it currently takes something like 23 days (I think two weeks for the local results officers to submit and then nine days for the central grading team to calculate, check and publish) to tournaround a grading list?
The deadline for July (e.g.) is normally about 15th July. Leagues are normally finished in the middle of May, so a league grader has maybe 6 weeks to get the results in. I suspect there's a heavy element of graders working to a deadline, and if the deadline was tighter (as it is in January), they'd get the results in sooner. But if the deadline is 15th July, why do the grading on 29th May?
I see that there might be an argument that a weekend congress finishing on 30th June, as may be the case this year, may struggle to get its results in that day for a list that's meant to be published on 1st July. But equally, if the next list after 1st July is 1st August, rather than 1st January, the issue of getting the results in that night isn't so big a deal. In fact, for FIDE-rated events three days before the end of the month is the deadline. So, for example, the World Rapidplay Championship will be FIDE-rated on 1st January, but the World Blitz Championship will be FIDE-rated on 1st February.
There's probably a genuine human resources issue at the ECF end of this process; will the right people be in the right place when the time to push the button goes live? It's the sort of thing where I imagine if it were a monthly issue, a more robust process will be put in place to make sure that happens than the prevailing process now. Whereas with a once-every-six month list, "it can wait a few days until I get back from Gibraltar", or "it can wait a few days until I'm back from holiday in India" is less likely to cause delays than in recent years, because that sort of thing will happen so frequently that the process will be designed to make sure that can't delay the system; whereas now, no one will notice if there's a 2-day delay because it takes so excruciatingly long anyway.