Instructions on Judging

You are supposed to make your ranking of the problems. If there is a minimal number of problems for a valid list this should have been specified in the announcement of the tourney.

All the entries are listed in the table on the left hand side. The order in the table changes as you change your opinion about the quality or placement of the problems.

    There are two ways to view the problems:
  1. Record view. Displays one problem at time. Click the respective author's name (or pseudonym in case of anonymous tourneys) in the table. To save the changes click the Submit button.
  2. List view. Displays multiple problems (all or selected scope) in one page. Click the button. Changes are saved instantly as you make them.

Important steps in process of judging

    Tipically the process of judgement consists of following steps:
  1. Solving each and every problem. The best, if not the only, way to get a realistic picture about the composition and to detect details which one may overlook by only reading the solution. Therefore the solutions are initally hidden in this application, but lazy judges can click the [Solution] button immediately if they want to.
  2. Reconstructing the problem. The best way to understand a technical aspect of the composition.
  3. Analyzing each entry and estimating its approximate quality.
  4. Comparing the problems of similar quality and deciding about their order.

This application provides the means to follow this practice. You can first mark the quality of all entries, and then make the ordered list of ranked problems.

Marking the problems

Currently the purpose of marking is to ease the preliminary job of grouping the entries according to their quality. It is recommended to start your judging by assigning a quality mark to each problem (those which you find to be really poor and with no chance to make in your final award you can simply leave unmarked). You can change the marks at any time in the process of judging. Once you have done with marking, you will have the list of all entries sorted by the quality, the best being on the top. After that you are ready to decide about their final order (rank).

Ranking the problems

In Record view use the options fild Rank below the diagram to specify the placement of the problem (all the problems previously placed to this or lower place will be moved one place down in the list).
In List view. Click the or icon to move the problem one place up or down in the ranking, or icon to clear the placement for respective problem. If the problem has not been ranked yet, a click on either arrow will place it at the bottom of the list of ranked entries.

Commenting the problem

Your comments are desired and wellcome for all problems, especially for those you estimated with high marks (3 or higher). All comments will be available in the Web version of the award. However, the selection of comments for printed version in the magazine is at editor's discretion.

Formal and thematic defects

If you discover any formal (unsoundness, cook, dual) or thematic incorrectness please check the respective checkbox(es) and describe the cause in the comment field. For claims of anticipations please supply the complete information about the predecessor (author, source, position, solution) as well as your explanation if you find it necessary.

Quality of judging

This kind of judging tourneys gives us the opportunity to estimate the quality of each individual jugement. The criteria for this is yet to be defined, but in principle the closer you are to the general opinion, the better you award will be estimated. The estimated quality of your jugement(s) can afterwards be used to calculate the coefficient by which your marks will be scalled in subsequent awards. Hopefully, this will gradually lead us to more and more objective awards. As already said, the exact formula has not been determined yet and members will have their chance to give the proposal or to comment the proposals by others.

The final award

Problems score the points from each individual jugement according to their placement. A general rule how it would be done has not been defined yet. However, for Liga problemista it will be done in the following way:

Ranked problems will score points from The twelve best placed problems from each list will score the points (each award according to the LP rules). The points will be summed and the problem with the highest total will be the winner, the one with next to the highest score will be the runner up and so on. The top 12 problems will score the points for the respective round of LP in the way regulated by the LP rules.

For problems with the same totals the additional criteria will be the highest placement(s) in each individual award. For instance, if the total for problems A and B is equal, and A is ranked as best by three, while B is ranked as best by two judges, then A will be placed above B in the final award. If two problems have the same number of 1st places then 2nd places are counted and so on until the 12th places. If the additional criteria doesn't make the difference, problems A and B will share the place.

The lists with less than 12 ranked problems will be discarded (provided that there are 12 or more entries, otherwise all problems must be ranked for a valid list). However, as there's always the possibility that some problems are later proved unsound, non-thematic or anticipated, it is desirable that each judge ranks few problems more.

Judging own problems

If you also submitted problems for the tourney you are judging you shouldn't take them in consideration for your ranking. However, in order to encourage all participants to take also part in a judging process, your entries (all of them!) will automatically score the maximal number points in your ranking. Thus, your work as a judge cannot be disadvantageous for you as a composer!