Tourney Documentation Overview

Each page describes a problems tourney arranged by or conducted through one source.

In a few cases, the tourneys were announced, commenced, but actually not finished. If they were reasonably well publicized, they will documented as normal tourneys.

In other cases, they may have been in early stages of planning, briefly mentioned in public media, but never realized or announced. In such cases, they will probably be documented separately together with similar cases.

For each individual tourney, the following information is normally present:

Title. Should include the arranger, if known. (The arranger is normally the person or organization that has some degree of responsibility to ensure that announced prizes exist.) Tourneys are often arranged by newspaper columns or chess periodicals,. Tourneys arranged as part of a chess congress typically include the location of the congress.

R:
Requirements

What did the arrangers asks from participants?

'Standard requirements' are sometimes omitted. They are:

Problems must be originals and unpublished.
Problems must not be conditional on any other requirement than the basic stipulation (e.g. 'Mate in three moves, by the knight')
Solutions must be included, typically together with the problems.
Problems (and solutions) must be labelled with a motto or other text, for identification purposes, and sent in a closed envelope bearing the same motto.
In a second envelope, labelled with that motto, the real name and address of the competitor should be provided.

If the tourney is divided into sections, they are indicated as follows:

a:
requirements for section a
b:
requirements for section b
x
C:
Closing date

At what date must the submissions have reached the arrangers? This is always the date/dates stated in the announcement, regardless of specific conditions. One tournament may say that problems must have reached the organizer on a certain date, or it may say that they must have done so before a certain date, or even that they must be postmarked not later than the closing date.
x
J:
Judges

Who decided the outcome of the tourney, and how? Were there any special directives from the arrangers regarding judging?
x
A:
Awards, prizes as well as honorary

This information covers at least the awards specified in the Requirements section. If any additional awards are known, they are usually included here as well. Mottos are included, as far as they are know.

If the requirements contains sections, so do the awards.
x
S:
Sources

Source references should be full and specific: at best, it should be possible to go straight to the page from which the information was taken, without having any special knowledge about the source, author or chess problem world.

This means that source references are (or will be) a kind of 'zoom in' from the most general source (typically a book or a serial publication) to the page, and the actual problem on that page. Problem numbers must not be interpreted outside this narrowing: if a problem number is misprinted, it is still that number that is on that page. While a correction is desirable, it will not drop the misprint. (In cases where this has actually happened, problem numbers are given as '*123 (see notes)' (where 123 is the misprint, and the asterisk flags an error.), or it may be given as '"123" = 132', where '"123"' flags the error and ' = 132' the correction.)

If an official tourney book was published it will be cited, even if the primary sources for the information are earlier publications.

For serial publications, volume and issue should be identified separately as 'v. 9, í. 99'. An older convention ('vol/issue', e.g. 1/1 or 23/5) is still used, but is being converted to the new notation.

Problem numbers are not supposed to be independent, but only to indicate a problem on the specified page. This means that if a series of problems follow some special convention, this won't necessarily be obvious. A problem may be labelled tourney problem 13, but the source reference will normally only refer to the problem that is numbered 13 on the specified page. This remains true even in the face of any later reassignments of problem numbers.
x
N:
Notes

Any additional information or observations.

Todo:
For incomplete tourneys: identify what needs to be done, unless it is obvious from the other records.

B:
Optionally, bibliographic info, or references to known library records or holdings, primarily for incomplete tourneys.

Prize-winning problems follow, with diagrams, and any additional details, to the extent that they are known. Non-prize-winning awards (i.e. honorary mentions, etc.) are normally not included as diagrams.

A Forsyth description of the diagram is included in this additional information. If clicked, the full string is selected, making it easier to copy and paste (although some web browsers seem to want include extra spaces around copied data, which may upset some chess applications.)