When did USCF take away 100 rating points from everybody?

I know a few older gentlemen who say that once upon a time, USCF took away 100 points from everybody. One was somewhat bitter about this, as his rating was 2198 at the time, and he's never been that close to master since. (Interestingly, he has a 2000 floor, despite never being over 2200)

I looked at the uscf ratings history and see no abrupt jumps, but the records only go back to 1991. Does anyone know when (and why?) this occured?  

I've been a USCF member since the early 80's and I don't remember any 100 point drop.  I think there would have been a massive protest.

If you are a USCF member, they have an online forum which goes back quite a ways (To 2005 at least) and has had many arguments about ratings. The history might be in there. I read for over an hour but didn't find any reports of an historic 100 point reduction.

I found one tangentially related thread of over 500 posts which might be from the same guy you mentioned, about how a reduction in the K factor (the multiplier used for ratings changes) wasn't fair, since he was studying hard and despite good performances couldn't get his rating back up to the close to the 2200 level it had once approached.

It may have something to do with rating floors which were changed once. They used to be 100 points below your max rating, which was far too high a floor and resulted in inflation, and so they lowered the floor to 200 points below your rating max.  I knew a guy who was stuck at his 1700 floor the longest time, and then when they changed the floor, he dropped to 1600 within a tournament or 2 because his skill level was well below 1600 as well.

They should do away with floors , there are better ways to fight sandbagging .  Certainly floors should be adjusted for senior players at the very least , its unfair to them not to . 

Reb seconded.

It wouldn't be too hard to implement an algorithm to drop a player's floor 100-200 points if they stay at their floor for a specified period of games.

Like?

Lots of rating systems have floors. At least in chess there is little physical aspect to it. Some rating systems take into account age or disability, or even have different age brackets to 68 year olds arnt playing 18 year olds unless they specifically want to.

Chess is approaching a computer rating approach like many other systems. Chess could be the first sport to have a computer rate you on ability instead of performance. Every other sport goes off your results, but chess I can see being able to go off your displayed strength according to computer analyziation. However, to be a part of the governing body you'd have to have every single persons game(s) be run through a computer for analysis to check for consistancy of strength.

Here is a paper (PDF) by Mark Glickman that talks about ratings. I've just skimmed it but I don't see anything so far that says anything like that happened (though many changes have happened to the rating forumulas).

http://www.glicko.net/research/acjpaper.pdf

Page 24 starts a small discussion the history of the USCF rating system and I don't see anything there about such a change (in a quick perusal).

But, purely result driven rating systems are the easiest to manipulate. There is a saying in golf that: "A 30 will never shoot a par, but a par can shoot a 30."  which is true. So, if you just go based off results on W/L, you can easily turn your 0 handicap into a 30, and then your 30 handicap into a win.

If you went by stats however, you could see that a 30 handicapper does not hit 90% of GIR, regardless of score. Or, by graphing it, you can see a direct relationship between GIR trends and field/opponent performance. Know what I mean?

So, with chess, you could use a computer analyzation. Remember, we're not talking about Super GM's here (open players) we're talking about 2200 or less, since those are the handicap brackets. Sure, things may get distorted the higher you go, but you could easily spot people in the wrong bracket, especially someone who is playing more than 1 level below.

A GIR is (Par - 2). That means on a Par 3, you get there in 1, and then 2 putt. On a Par 5, you get there in 3, then 2 putt. To be a +30 handicapp means you shoot on average 30 over. Since golf, like chess, is a game of percision, there are certain thresholds that a high handicapp player cannot pass without cheating. And the cheating can only happen one way, that is the high handicap player can never perform like a zero handicap, while a zero can easily take 1-2 extra strokes per hole quite easily to pretend to be a 30.

Now, if you go solely based off results, you can easily see how a person can pad their score. However, there are other stats that you can consider besides just the raw score. For example, a 0 handicap will always hit many more GIR's than a 30. In fact, a 30 may not hit any over an entire round. A zero may hit 50% GIR pretending to be a 30, and that would be inconsistant with an actual 30's performance. A zero may play perfect golf when they are behind whereas a 30 has little chance to.

There will always be an error stat in any rating system. All im saying is that in a game such as chess you can quite easily incorporate computer analytics to check for suspected cheaters.

And how do you control sandbagging?

Not everybody is a large organizer like the CCA or USCF.  You have some of those middling club TDs that never ran a tournament with more than 20 people in their life!  They are not going to research the history of all of their participants and make a judgment on who sandbagged going into their tournament.

So how do you prevent me from taking that 2104 rating of mine and changing it to 1204 via losing 250 games straight and then entering the Under 1300 section of a large tournament?

Floors are a necessary evil!

If some rated player loses lots of rating points in a short time its pretty obvious whats going on , unless there is some medical reason for it or a tragic accident or something .... floors keep older players from being competitive anymore and only encourages them to stop playing ... is that what we want with so few otb players already ?  I don't think so . 

I have been playing uscf chess since 73 and dont recall 100 rating points ever being taken away ... 

I'm starting to wonder if the comment was not actually litteral. If the comment was referring to inflation, that could be a reason to say "everyone lost 100 rating points". It's kinda like holding on to a $100 for 10 years. At the end of ten years you'd have a $100 "worth" $90 if it was burried in the ground.

Anyone who wants to lose 250 games straight so they can win an U1300 tournament is welcome to do so IMO.

Hmm well if the uscf never took the rating points away, I wonder what they meant. The floors are def. a possibility.  

Anyone know why someone would have a floor of 2000 despite never breaking 2200? 

Extremely shortsighted. The whole point of sangbagging is to control your rating (rating management) and not taking an existing high rating and trying to dump 100's of games to play a lot lower.

If you're a 2000 rated player but are actually rated 1800, then being a sandbagger means your rating will never hit 2000 because of your "ratings management". To say that the 1800 rated player will attempt to dump 100's of games to play down to 1300 is a pretty big misunderstanding.

Rating floors are a source of rating inflation.  Get rid of them.

?

I think you completely missed his point and don't understand why sandbaggers sandbag.

At one point the floor was 100 lower than your highest rating (referrence post #3 above and I think the PDF I linked mentioned it).

It's possible the player in question never had the floor adjusted.