BUCA (Universities Team Championship) - Games Now Available

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John Saunders
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BUCA (Universities Team Championship) - Games Now Available

Post by John Saunders » Mon Mar 29, 2010 12:45 pm

The games from the BUCA (British Universities Chess Association) Team Championship, held in Oxford, 27-28 January 2010, are now available at Britbase.

http://www.saund.co.uk/britbase/2010buca.html

My thanks to Alex Holowczak for the games (as well as his splendid revival of this excellent event) and Adam Raoof for forwarding the games to me.
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Alex Holowczak
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Re: BUCA (Universities Team Championship) - Games Now Availa

Post by Alex Holowczak » Mon Mar 29, 2010 1:03 pm

February 27/28, not January!

I also would like to thank Katie Smith and Sam Doran, who assisted me with them, spending most of the last week trawling through them all.

As an aside, we put the ECF grades of players as the grades as preference to their FIDE ratings (more people had ECF grades), so there may be players whose ratings you see in FIDE form on the website that disagrees with their actual FIDE ratings - the FIDE ratings shown on the site are their converted ECF grades instead.

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John Saunders
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Re: BUCA (Universities Team Championship) - Games Now Availa

Post by John Saunders » Mon Mar 29, 2010 2:49 pm

Sorry about that, Alex: I have amended January to February on BritBase.

Where a tournament is not FIDE-rated, it seems perfectly legitimate to me to put ECF grades converted to Elo format, rather than players' published FIDE ratings. You have to think about it from the prospective database user's point of view - they will want reasonably accurate (but not necessarily exact) FIDE ratings shown so that they can judge the quality of the game they are looking at or perform sensible searches by rating. What I would imagine that they definitely don't want to see are ECF grades, which will detract from the overall usability of their databases if they add the tournament database to their main database.

Anyway, that is my policy as regards BritBase. To summarise: I am hot on the accuracy of the moves but lukewarm about the strict accuracy of ratings, though I prefer at least an approximation of a player's rating to be shown if possible (as an aid to the end-user). Therefore I would advise BritBase users not to treat ratings shown as "gospel" - it is not intended to be a source or repository for rating data. What I try not to do is show ECF grades as I think these are positively misleading and a nuisance for the end user to have to convert.

Note also that, when I show FIDE-rated events on BritBase, I sometimes show FIDE ratings for those who have them and ECF conversions for those that don't. I realise that this might make some rating purists cringe, but I think most database users will be more interested in having a close approximation of a given player's strength than no data at all.

That said, when people make submissions to me for BritBase, I still prefer to see ECF grades in the rating field rather than nothing at all. It is obviously easier for me to convert the grades than to have to look them up on the grading list and then convert them.
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