The World Othello Federation has the objective of setting up a world ratinglist for all Othello players.
In the meantime, I am happy to collect all tournaments results from all over the world to compute a ratinglist using the European algorithm. Of course, these same files will be used to generate the world ratinglist once the algorithm is determined. Please, send all results to Emmanuel.Lazard(-AT-)katouche.fr

To make things easier for me and with the idea of a future automatic calculation, I would like all results files to follow a specific format as described below.

Files

• Each file should be a pure ASCII text file without any accented characters,
• The file is composed of a header, comments (including new players) and results,
• The filename should be in the form "YYYYMMDD_NAME.ELO".
  • YYYY, MM and DD are respectively year, month and day of the tournament. If the tournament spans several days, the date of the FIRST day should be used. If several tournaments are held the same day, their order is given by adding a character ('a', 'b', 'c'...) after the day in the filename (for example '20080504a_EGP_USHUAIA.ELO'),
  • The NAME part of the filename should be related to the name of the tournament. Letters (without accents), numbers and underscore character can be used. Its size is limited to 30 characters (so that the filename does not exceed 44 characters).
    Examples of correct filenames: "20071130_WOC.ELO", "20080405_EGP_ALKMAAR.ELO", "20020725a_2nd_Japan_Open.ELO"...

Header

• The tournament name (TTT in the example above) is its full name (always without accented characters). Any number or punctuation can be used. Examples of correct names: "8th Dutch EGP - Alkmaar 2008", "Nordic Champ. 2007", "Rose's wedding tournament, Tokyo 2005"...
• The country information specifies the country in which the tournament is played, even for international tournaments (the only exception is "world" for the WOC; other exceptions could be defined in future use for supra-national championships). Current countries include: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Great-Britain, Holland, Hong-Kong, Iceland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Norway, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, USA, World.
• Date information gives the date of the tournament in the exact following format: "DD/MM/YYYY". If the tournament lasts more than one day, its FIRST and LAST dates are exactly listed: "DD/MM/YYYY - dd/MM/YYYY". As for the filename, if several tournaments are held the same day, the date can give their order by adding a 'a', 'b', 'c'...
• Sender should be the name of the person who can be contacted for any inquiries about the file.

Comments

This makes it easier to manually spot errors.

All players will also be included by way of comments (see below).

Results

Each non-commented line should either be blank or contain a game result. Each game result is given by indicating each player's number and score, the result (win, loss, draw) in between, and the colour of the first player.

• A win is written '>' (the first listed player - not necessarily Black - won against the second one),
• A loss is written '<',
• A draw is written '=',

Scores and colour information are currently not used for ratings purposes but we may need them later when the final algorithm is decided. Therefore, it is asked to send results using a format where the scores are given in between parenthesis and the colour of the first player is indicated ('B' or 'W') by a last character:

Alignment of all columns is not compulsory but here again, makes manual reading easier. All played games, that lead to a result, correctly generated in a pairing should be listed in the file, even if a players abandons. BYE pairings should never be included

No check will be made between the result character and the score. For example some countries count a draw as a win for one of the player [(32)>(32)], or the winner may have fewer discs than his opponent because of an error when transmitting the result [(30)>(34)]. The current algorithm only uses the result character to compute ratings.

Players' numbers

New players

List of players

All players participating in the tournament must be listed in the file just after the header. Each player will be described by the following line:

New players (ie, new ID) should be preceeded by a '+' sign. Examples:

All players for whom a result is given in the data must be listed. Score and disc-count will not be used to check the data but only for human inspection if anything goes wrong (they may be omitted if not available).

In case of doubt (or if for example, the assigned range is all used up), a simple four character identifier can be used throughout the file to list a new player and his results. This identifier will be replaced by a correct number when I shall process the file:

If a four character identifier is used for the second player, be sure to separate it from the colour information by a space or tab character.