Nuova Rivista degli Scacchi, 1879

In the Sep. issue, 1879, the notice of L. Centurini's donation of additional prizes was repeated, previously published on the cover of the August issue. Correct single problems of faulty sets would compete for these prizes.

In the same issue, it was stated that only one set would be allowed per competitor. Any superfluous sets already sent in were recommended to be withdrawn. Additionally, the closing date was postponed by two months.

The judge's report said that the number of direct mate problems were 52, eight of which were withdrawn. Of the remainder 27 were defect. Four sets were disqualified due to having been already published, which the tourney management to some extent appear to have treated as a joke rather than deliberate plagiarism. 13 sets remained. (The set Salve Regina appear to have been demolished due to a printing error; it was later re-admitted to competition.)

As regards the excentric sets, 23 were received, three were withdrawn, and one disqualified for an incomprehensible solution. The judge noted the difficulty of judging excentric chess problems where no common rules for evaluation are present, and based his judgement on beauty and originality of idea, and also on the difficulty the author had to overcome.

The judge's report originally awarded the special prizes to #3 of Sanctus Sylvester and #4 of Es gedeihe das Schach allüberall. The final report identified this as a mistake: the awards should have been reversed: #4 of Sanctus Sylvester and #3 of Es gedeihe ... . Additionally, the final report noted that one of the sets given an honorary mention by the judge had turned out to be faulty, and so awarded the hm. to the set Es gedeihe ... instead.

The final report omitted the name of the composer of Es gedeihe ...: a footnote explained that the competitor had requested to withdraw the set from competition, as well as keep his identity secret. This request had arrived when the report was already set up to be printed, suggesting that the request was not rejected outright. The date of the request was not published: it is not known if it was made before the judge's report was printed, or after.

In the following issue, the request for secrecy was noted to be more or less useless as German newspapers had already revealed that the competitor was J. Berger of Graz. (These sources are so far unknown.) The Nuova Rivista added that J. Berger had refused to accept the prize for the #3.

No reason for the withdrawal appear to have been published, or can easily be inferred from the printed criticism of the two problems.


The first prize problem of the Bizzarria section was published with extensive notes on how moves on one board (say, the center board), would affect the other boards. No attempt at a summary of the stipulation can make full justice to this discussion: the interested solver is recommended to use the original source as cited with the diagram.

No complete solution appears to have been published, which makes it difficult to verify the problem. The only known solution is the key move and the board it is made on. (See Nuova Rivista degli Scacchi, v5/8 (Sep.-Oct., 1880), p. 249. No errata has been noted so far.)