Ratings and IDs

In a tournament section, and on a master player file, there are, for each player, two special rating fields, and one special ID field. This is in addition to the ratings and IDs which are kept in the data blocks for the different features.

Rating Fields

For the tournament section, the two ratings are the ones that can actually be used in running the tournaments—for ranking players and determining the ratings gaps between them so which ratings you choose to use (if any—some tournaments such as Round Robins can be run without any rating information) is quite important. The rating fields aren't as important on a master file as even if you add players from a master file into your tournament, you can use a different set of ratings in the target tournament.

The two ratings (called the Main Rating and the Second/Local Rating) can be used in different ways in running a tournament. Usually, the Main Rating is the most important, but you can have the Second Rating be the controller, particularly if you are using WinTD to compute a "local" rating system, which always works through the Second/Local fields. See Pairing System: Pairing Numbers for a description of the different ways the two ratings are used in ranking the players and Local Ratings for a discussion of computing local ratings.

Your choices for what the two ratings represent is covered by Main Rating Field and Second Rating Field popups in the Ratings Tab in the Add/Edit a Section dialog for tournament use, and the Master Player Setup dialog for master player files. Which choices are available for these depends upon which features you have included in the tournament of which the section is a part or on the master file. For instance, if you include the FIDE features, you will be able to choose any of the three FIDE ratings (standard, rapid or blitz). The choice of "User-defined" is always available, as are the "US Chess regular" and "FIDE standard", even if you aren't using US Chess or FIDE features.

For all rating fields, please note that unrated is shown as a blank cell, not a 0. (0 is a number and is treated as one).

ID field

US Chess and FIDE both use numeric fields for the ID (US Chess is exactly 8 digits, FIDE has a varying number of digits). The on-line services allow longer fields with a combination of alphabetic, numeric characters and some special characters such as _. Because of this, the ID fields can accept non-numerical values. Your choice for what (if anything) the ID represents is controlled by the ID Field popup in the Ratings Tab in the Add/Edit a Section dialog for tournament use, and the Master Player Setup dialog for master player files. As with the ratings, which choices are available depends upon the features you have included, and will always include "User-Defined" if you have your own or some other system for identifying players.