British Chess Magazine, 1890 (Direct Mate Problem Tourney)

The tourney was announced together with a self-mate tourney. The conditions for participation as well as closing date were the same, received problems were reported together, and the tourneys were also reported together. This may raise the question if they were separate tourneys, or only separate sections of a single tourney. As the tourneys are kept separate in the British Chess Magazine as Problem Tourney and Sui-Mate Tourney they are considered to be separate tourneys.

Four prizes were mentioned in the original announcement. Three additional prizes were donated by J. A. Miles; these are first mentioned in the tourney report.

The judges were instructed to award points, not exceeding 100, according to merit. (Based on the reported scores, these instructions were for each problems separately.) The sum of these scores would decide the problem ranking order. It was left to each judge to decide if and how different aspects of a problem, such as beauty, and difficulty, should be scored.

Forty-nine problems passed a preliminary examination, and were published, starting before the closing date of the tourney. Published problems were numbered, and these numbers were used as references in the later report.

The report notes that fifty-two problems entered for the competition. In the preliminary examination, three were found to be unsound, and not published. Of the remaining problems, two were found to have been published (prbs. 4 and 7), one was found to be unsolvable, and five further problems were found to be faulty by solvers.

The two published problems were by E. St. Maurice and noted to have been printed in Canadian Chess Collection (see below).

A list of problems that scored at least 60 points by any of the judges was published in the report (22 problems from H. A. Miles, 18 from E. N. Frankenstein, and 14 from J. Pierce). The names of the authors of all published tourney problems were printed, with the exception of prbs. 4 and 7 (see above) which were identified separately.

The awards were preliminary, and remained open for two month. No indication of changes has been found, but neither was there any confirmation of the preliminary awards.


A review of the solutions to tourney problem shows one problem without a solution (prb. 8), and four problems with multiple solutions (prbs. 6, 16, 18, 22.) The fifth problem cooked by solvers was prb. 23 with a short solution.

The only expressed requirement for submitted problems seems to have been that they should have been original and hitherto unpublished, which leaves the meaning of hitherto somewhat unclear: relative to the announcement itself or to some other point in the timeline of the tourney? Problems 4 and 7 (see above) were first published in B.C.M. The publication mentioned in the report as previous in Canadian Chess Problems appears to have been around September, 1890. (Some earlier mentions of the book (The Gazette (Montreal), April and May, 1890) are not clearly based on anything but preliminary information.)