Appendix H: Additional Notes for the ECF Tournament Director
1. ECF Grades and Elo Ratings
ECF grades are calculated in a different way to FIDE Elo ratings, but an approximate conversion is FIDE = ECF x 7.5 + 700. Vega provides a tool for converting between ECF grades and FIDE ratings( Rating Report → ECF → Grades to EloFIDE conversion utility).
If the user selects the ENG federation when creating the tournament, then the field“ Rtg Nat” will be automatically treated as ECF grades. Even the grading performance is calculated according to the ECF rules.
If the box Use FIDE rating is checked, pairing will use FIDE ratings. However, if a player does not have a FIDE rating, Vega will use the national rating instead. When this is an ECF grade Vega uses the conversion FIDE = ECF * 7.5 + 700.
ECF Player Databases Vega is configured to make use of two alternative ECF grading databases:
a) The CSV database that can be downloaded from the Grading section of the ECF web-site http:// www. englishchess. org. uk / This database can be selected by pressing Set DB on the Players Archive page and choosing archive ECF from the list of predefined databases. It is not necessary to specify a data filter as this is pre-loaded.
b) The ECF Grading master list( if available). This is usually supplied in dBase(. dbf format), but can be opened with Microsoft Excel( for example) and saved again as a text format(. csv) file. Before saving the text format file it is necessary to set the field delimiter as‘;’ instead of‘,’( as described in Section 2.11.3). The appropriate data filter is set by clicking Set Filter, then Load Filter and choosing MasterListECF from the list of available filters.
2. ECF Rating Report
In order to produce the appropriate ECF rating report, a tournament director should be aware of the following:
a) When creating a new tournament, ENG must be selected in the Federation dropdown box
b) This way the strength of the players is given in ECF grades, otherwise their Elo rating is given instead.
c) The ID NAT field of a player should be filled with the exact code found in the database of the ECF. If the player is not yet graded and he is not present in any database, the ORIGIN field must be filled with the club code of the player( it is a 4 characters long). If both ID NAT and ORIGIN fields are empty then the ECF Checker program will flag an error.
d) The report is generated by using the menu item Report→ECF→Process current section and filling in the following form:
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