St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 1880

Problems were copied before they were sent to the judge, to ensure that no clues to authorship would remain. Problems found to be faulty would be returned to their authors, but they could not re-enter the tourney.

Problems would be judged on Beauty of Idea, Originality of Design, Difficulty of Solution, Accuracy of Construction and Elegance of Construction, at most 10 points for each category. (The judge, however, did not report on these scores, either individually or combined.)

A Solvers' Tourney was held at the same time.

The Umpire's Report says that of 33 entries, 19 were judged on. Four problems were not included as they were disqualified for some rule violation (not #3, not submitted on diagram, etc.), and one additional problem was withdrawn by its author. Six problems proved to have multiple solutions, and were ignored for that reason. However, while the report assigns a hm. award to problem 20 (listed in the awards summary above), it also lists it as one of the problems with multiple solutions.

The report is somewhat ambiguous on the reasons for giving problem 21 the first prize, saying "... as its superiority over the rest in point of difficulty alone would have entitled it to the honor." This is difficult to interpret: does it mean that the Difficulty of Solution score for this problem surpassed the combined scores for all other problems, as it seems to say? Or does it indicate that the judge did not follow his instructions, and considered difficulty alone for adjudication? Or did he only say that this problem had a difficulty score larger than any other problem, but phrased it in an unfortunate manner? (As the report does not say anything about full or partial scores for the individual problems it is difficult to decide.)


The used source for 1881-01-02 unfortunately has an title page where issue number is illegible. Issue 217 has been assigned based on the issue number of the following day.