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This page describes the process of submitting tournament results.
Directors of sanctioned NASPA tournaments are responsible for submitting the results promptly to ensure that player records and ratings are kept up to date.
All tournament results must be submitted electronically, and every tournament director is expected to be technically able to do so without assistance. If you are unable to do so, please ask one of your colleagues for help on the naspa-tcd mailing list.
To receive your tournament data and rate your tournament, the following things need to happen.
When the last step is complete, you will be shown your updated NASPA account information, including a new invoice that will have been posted for the participation fee for your tournament. If different NASPA members are to be responsible for submitting rating data and paying the participation fee, you can either include a note with the rating data, or email John Chew to have the invoice transferred to the member responsible for payment. Please also see our webpage on payment terms for a description of current penalties on overdue accounts.
The rated tournament database is maintained semi-automatically by John Chew based on the official tournament calendar, updated at the beginning of each calendar month. If you do not see your tournament listed on the rating data submission page or in the tsh LISTT command, it is possible that the wrong codirector has been assigned the responsibility for submitting rating data. Please contact John to have this corrected.
If your tournament has multiple events, such as Early Birds, Late Birds, Night Birds, Lunch Birds and Main Events, each one must have its own entry in the rated tournament database. Please pay close attention to the dates and times when choosing the event whose data you are submitting, to ensure that the events are rated in the correct order.
If your tournament has SOWPODS divisions, those are currently treated as separate events, and must also have their own database entries. If you are preparing to direct a tournament in the SOWPODS rating system, please consult the page on SOWPODS tournaments for additional considerations.
Check to make sure that all of your players are listed in the membership database as unexpired members. A member is expired if their expiry date is earlier than your tournament. If a member's expiry date is 0000-00-00, then they have ordered a membership online, but it has not yet been processed. Rating data will not be accepted if any players are not members.
In order not to delay processing of your rating data, if you have players who want to pay for their memberships through you, or players who say they have recently mailed us membership checks, you should log onto Member Services and use our online membership system to create memberships for them. At the end, when you are asked how you want to pay for their memberships, indicate that you will pay later with your tournament's participation fee. If you do so, the memberships will be activated right away so that you can proceed with submitting rating data. Do not pay by credit card, as this will delay the creation of the memberships until our staff can review the credit card transaction.
In the case where you have players who say that their membership checks are in the mail, we suggest that you ask them for some form of security, such as a replacement membership check that you agree not to cash if we receive the check they mailed. Deduct the amount of any such memberships from the total amount that you remit to us at the end of your tournament; they will remain as outstanding items on your bill, but be removed when we receive the mailed checks.
If however we do not receive the member's mailed check, the charge will remain on your account, and you will not be able to run another sanctioned tournament until you make good their membership fees.
Instructions vary according to the software that you are using to run your tournament.
If you are using tsh, make sure you are connected to the Internet and enter the SUBMIT command. The software uploads the results and redirects you to the payment form for final submission.
Note: you must UPDATE to the current version on or after 2009-07-10 to obtain the above functionality and set the configuration variables director_id and tournament_id to your NASPA ID and your event’s ID (use the LISTTourneys command to find the latter; you can alternately go to Submit Rating Data in Member Services, look for your tournament in the popup menu and see the number next to it). If you use an older version, the network commands will be unable to connect to the correct website and report an error. As an additional benefit of updating, the USERATINGS command will warn you if any of your players are not current members, or have memberships which will expire within the next seven days.
If you are unable to use the SUBMIT command (e.g., because you are not online, have a firewall, are running a very old version of Windows), run the SUBMIT command, ignore any error messages, then look in your event folder for a file called all.tsh. You can submit this file manually as described below.
Save the results in a text file as instructed in one of the following subsections. Use one text file per event.
Go to Member Services in the sidebar at left. Log on, if necessary. If you are registered as a NASPA director, you will see a button labelled Submit Ratings. If your event is registered in the tournament schedule, you will be able to choose it from a menu. Do so, select the file you are going to upload, and submit it. If there are inconsistencies in your data, or nonmembers among your players, you will be asked to correct the situation and resubmit. When you have successfully submitted your data, you will be directed to a payment screen. If you are submitting data for more than one event (e.g., if you have an Early Bird), you may wait until you have submitted all your data before making payment. If you have trouble, contact John Chew.
The author of the Director! program has asked that we not post instructions on submitting NASPA rating data using his program. Since there are however NASPA directors who need to do so, and who frequently encounter difficulty doing so, please note that NASPA requires that player names in rating data files be spelled exactly the way they are in our database. Director! sometimes alters the order of the words in a player's name, so if you see an error message saying that one of your players is not a NASPA member, you may need to save a rating data file, and edit it with WordPad (or NotePad) before submitting the file through Member Services.
If you are using TourneyMan, use the “Save for Chew” menu item to create a file whose name ends in “.CHW”, and then upload the file.
TourneyMan has limits on the lengths of player names. If you are trying to submit results for an event that included Verna Richards Berg, TourneyMan will omit the “s” in “Richards”. Use a text editor such as NotePad to restore the “s” before uploading the “.CHW” file.
If you have used two or more data files to run your event and need to combine them into one to submit your data, use WordPad to edit them together into the file described below under No Software.
If you are using TMENU, use the “Copy computer data to a Disk” command and choose the Format “NSA crosstable disk”. Make sure you choose the option to include game scores in the output. Then upload the file.
For example, if a player ("Bob") rated 1570 is allowed to play in a division for players rated 1600 and up, while another player ("Fred") rated 1580 chooses not to play up, enter "Bob's" rating as 1600 so he will be ranked above "Fred".
If you are using other software, please contact the Web Committee to have its instructions posted here.
Software developers should contact John Chew for details of a richer data format recommended for automatic generation of result submissions.
If you are using no software to run your tournament, you should prepare an ASCII text file (not a Word document or a Unicode text file). It should look as follows, and you should upload it when it is ready.
#division A #ratingcheck off Chew, John, III:CM000003 1800 3 0 2 3 0 2; 300 50 350 300 50 300 Edley, Joe 2000 0 3 1 0 3 1; 50 300 350 0 300 400 Butts, Alfred 500 1 2 0 1 2 0; 400 400 50 400 400 50 #division B Doe, John 1500 3 0 2 3 0 2; 300 50 350 300 50 300 Doe, Jane 1400 0 3 1 0 3 1; 50 300 350 50 300 400 Doe, Kate 1300 1 2 0 1 2 0; 400 400 50 400 400 50 #division C Sherman, Joel:AA000999 2000 3 0 2 3 0 2; 300 50 350 300 50 300 Wapnick, Joel:AA000386 2000 0 3 1 0 3 1; 50 300 350 50 300 400 Horn, Joel:AA000172 1800 1 2 0 1 2 0; 400 400 50 400 400 50
Here is how to read the above.
We do also support, but do not encourage new directors to use, older data formats. If you are used to using an older format to submit NSA results, please feel free to continue to keep using it with NASPA results. Player’s NASPA id (following the first name, separated by a colon) can optionally be added to the old format files.
Our various payment options are summarized on our Payment page.
When you submit your ratings data, an invoice will be added to your member account, and you can make online payments toward it using major credit cards through the Member Services link. The former NSA payment system is now deactivated. Here is a link to member services:
http://www.scrabbleplayers.org/cgi-bin/services.pl
If you cannot pay by credit card online, you can mail your check for participation fees in U.S. funds payable to NASPA to:
NASPA PO BOX 12115 DALLAS TX 75225-0115 USA
Submitting payment by mail will not delay rating of your event.
The participation fee is $.50 per person per game for all rated tournaments (club tournaments as well), not including byes or forfeits.
Canadian tournament directors have the option of submitting the participation fees for their events in Canadian dollars. These payments should be made by a cheque or money order made out to "John Robertson" and sent to 17 Fourth Avenue, Cambridge, ON, N1S 2C9. (The present exchange rate, which will be frequently amended, is $1.15 Canadian = $1.00 U.S.) Please include an accompanying note explaining which tournament(s) the participation fees are for. You may also include any NASPA membership fees that you may have collected at your event along with the members’ personal data.
Many directors submit tournament data on the day on which a tournament ends, almost all do so by the end of the following day, and this is the level of service that players expect. If the Rating Officer (currently John Chew) is online, rating data will be processed within a few minutes of receipt, and transferred to our sister site cross-tables.com within an hour. In extreme cases, there might be a delay of as much 24 hours in processing ratings; whenever such delays can be anticipated, the directors involved will be individually warned by email.
The NSA’s late fee of $0.25 per person for events whose data is not received within two weeks of the last date of an event is no longer in effect. Instead, the director who is responsible for submitting an event’s data will be warned by email if that data has not been correctly submitted within two weeks of the end of the event; if the situation still persists another two weeks later, the director’s certification will be downgraded by one step: full to apprentice, or apprentice to uncertified.
Prompt payment is expected for all outstanding fees. Overdue accounts will be charged a 2% penalty per calendar month; membership will be suspended if payment is not received in full within three months; such suspended memberships will only be reinstated when payment is made in full including penalties. Directors with an overdue account may not post future events to the tournament calendar.
Directors should not interpret the two week’s grace period before the first warning as a suggestion that they ought to wait this long before submitting data.
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