in der neuen Ausgabe von idee & form hat Reto Aschwanden einen bemerkenswerten Beitrag über das Richten der für das FIDE-Album eingesandten Aufgaben und die Einsendepraxis der Autoren geschrieben. Dieser Artikel hat schon zu lebhaften Diskussionen zwischen Preisrichtern geführt.
Ich bin Reto und Thomas Maeder für die Erlaubnis sehr dankbar, diesen Beitrag hier in seiner (leicht überarbeiteten) englischen Fassung veröffentlichen zu dürfen: Vielleicht trägt das zur weiteren Diskussion dieses Themas, das sich auch auf WCCI und WCCT übertragen lässt, bei?!
What are the downsides of the proposal?
1. Beginner composers often can’t make sound assessment of the real quality of their work. They might higher the effort needed to get a composition sound than its intrinsic quality. They might fail to detect anticipations. For these beginners, the first participation in the FIDE Album serves for gaining some experience – what are my problems worth?
2. Any experienced FIDE Album judge will decline to take shortcuts in assessing the problems to be judged. Ideally, the assessment process should follow the rules of a formal tournament. The point is that no judge should ever give a default score because it won’t genuinely reflect his qualified opinion.
3. I think there are better ways of avoiding spamming. If the limit 30 compositions / author is too large, then reduce it to MAX(12, 1.5 x no problems selected in the previous FA cycle).
The first time I acted as a judge in the FIDE Album I felt overwhelmed and thought of selection process improvements. That’s absolutely a normal reaction.
Although I still think some improvements in the current selection process are possible, I enjoy more the experience of analyzing some truly remarkable compositions and learning new things and opinions from other judges.
Maybe the album selection can add a new section called „best entries by junior and first time participants“?
This could be restricted to a specific number of entries depending on their strength.
I disagree on some points:
1. Beginner composers can/should learn what their compositions are worth by participating in (in)formal tourneys and getting feedback from the judges/solvers. The onus is on the beginner to become knowledgeable and competent in a field. If a problem got a 7th commendation, then it is highly unlikely that it should be sent to the Album (I have 1. Prizes which I did not send to the Album…). It is the Wimbledon issue: Nobody expects playing at Wimbledon as a beginner – why should a beginner composer expect the analogue, playing for the FIDE Album? I really don’t get it.
2. Giving default scores would act as a sort of red card when a composer did not follow the quality guidelines – I certainly would not have any issues with that. The composer likely had no guilty conscience when submitting say 20 mediocre problems either.
3. Could be an additional condition.
Interesting debate. Though I have never judged for the FIDE album and my approval rate is below 100%, let me give some thoughts. There are at least two factors at play which I think make this a delicate matter, competition and subjectivity.
Competition does not just include titles, also WCCI, which AFAIK is to be judged together with the FIDE album in the future. And even if you do get rid of titles, the prestige of being represented in the „hall of fame“ with a certain number of compositions might be an incentive for composers to send a higher number of compositions to (maybe only seemingly?) increase their chances of getting in.
Reto’s suggestion might be an effective solution to reduce judges‘ work.
But evaluation of chess problems is, of course, not objective. The ranking a composer gives for his submissions might be quite different from how a judge ranks the problems. Imagine a composer submitting, say, 30 problems, and among the top three he puts two problems which – among remarkable thematic content -contain weasels. The composer doesn’t mind weasels, but the album judge might find them defective and give less than 2 points. Now what? The judge will have saved quite some work, but a list of (potentially good) problems wrongly might receive a score of 1.
There exist different standards of what composers find publishable, even different understandings of originality. Some composers will publish several variations of the same idea where others might say, „well, one of the problems would have sufficed.“ There are different composing styles, opinions on the importance of material economy or things like purity of aim. And when looking at existing FIDE albums you will be able to find enough problems where judges‘ scores differ. So for composers to gauge what to submit is definitely not a no-brainer.
A different approach to reducing judges‘ work might be to increase the number of judges and randomly assign each judge an equal portion of the problems, such that when there are n>3 judges and every problem is looked at by 3 judges, each judge only has to look at 3/n of the problems. Of course, this has advantages and disadvantages. The work per judge goes down, the number of judges to be found increases, so I’m not sure whether overall it becomes easier or harder to find judges. Also, given that judges may have different standards and give different average points, the chances of a problem getting into the album will depend on the (random) choice of judges. An advantage might be that it resolves the issue of judging the problems submitted by judges.
This year was my first time serving as a judge for the two-mover section of the Album, and I agree completely with the proposals in this article.
The process was extremely long and arduous. I was given more than 1,100 problems to evaluate, and setting up and playing through each one takes me at least 15 to 20 minutes, with some taking considerably longer. That amounts to roughly 400 hours of work. This is an especially busy period in my career, and the time required was simply too much.
I believe composers need to be more selective about what they submit. Some submitted more than a hundred problems. I understand that some composers are remarkably prolific and capable of producing many high-quality problems. But should any single composer really have more than 100 entries in one genre of a single Album? This supports the article’s third point, that judges need to evaluate problems more strictly.
I also support the proposal that composers rank their submissions. It would encourage them to evaluate their own work more critically and might discourage the “submit everything” approach.
Finally, I agree that the entire process is at risk of collapse, and with the comments that the titles tied to FIDE Album points are a major part of the problem.
Als Richter für die aktuelle s#-Auswahl kann ich Reto ebenfalls zustimmen. Nach Abzug der Duplikate und einer Aufgabe mit einer falschen Forderung (auch das gibt es) verblieben etwa 850 Stücke zur Bewertung. Angesichts des zur Verfügung stehenden Zeitraums ist das durchaus machbar, aber phasenweise hatte ich auch keinen Spaß am Durchsehen der Bewerbungen …
Die Idee der vorherigen Sortierung durch die Autoren ist m.E. nicht neu. Ob sie tatsächlich hilft, bezweifele ich. Grundsätzlich befürworte ich aber das Anliegen von Reto, den Einsende- und Auswahlprozess praktikabler zu gestalten.
It’s a challenging matter.
I’ve been one of FIDE-Album judge three time in the past and I faced the same difficulties, maybe even greater since I’ve judged the helpmates section when they were not splitted into sub-categories at that time, a nightmare…
“Submit everything” is difficult to contain. An efficient “constraint” exists and it pertains the “quantity (“no more than 30 compositions published in the defined three-year period, or up to 3 times the number of his/her compositions that were selected in this section in any previously published album, whichever is greater ”) but a similar constraint does not exist for quality.
I don’t have a reasonable or pragmatic answer and your proposal seems interesting though in my humble opinion it is very suitable only for experienced composers.
Moreover electronic submission could be efficient and time-saving.
One can only imagine, and not come to the right end result, the work load of the FIDE Album judges. Not commenting on the amount of entries, here another approach:
In the case of proof games, five judges receive, as I have understood, the entries submitted in PDF-form. All of them have the same routine: every proof game is put on the board, hundreds of long solutions are manually reviewed in a tedious process. What if the entries were in digital form? In PDB one can play through long proof games in a short time. Or an even better example from Chess Composers Club: all entries of all eight groups of the present WCCT are in digital form, easy to browse through and very much timesaving. The FA judges have an enormous task; why are they bothered with entries in a form that starts to be outdated when there are better forms? – The same goes for the printed FA; who has the time and energy to play through the problems? Further, if in electronic form, it would probably contribute to the popularization of chess problems.
To sum up: the FIDE Album selection process and the outcome, i.e. the Album, into electronic form!
Everything electronic would be a great help, agreed.
But for my bookshelf, I really also want a printed version.
Making an electronic version of the Album has been discussed in the past few WCCC meetings. No traction!
To fully appreciate a proofgame you don’t just look at what works, but also what does NOT work. And you’ll need to put the position on a board and play around for that.
Look at this blog: The value isn’t in that you can click in the PNG viewer to see the solution, the value is in the detailed explanations.
I have an infinity approval rate. I never submitted anything and have one composition in the FIDE Album.
The FIDE album has been broken for quite some time. The fault, imo, is titles. Some people seem to be more interested in titles than chess composition.
Infinity is pretty cool 😉
I agree, one big issue is titles. I would actually be in favor of getting of all the titles, but of course, that will never happen.
Ich stimme den Ausführungen von Reto voll zu.
Ich kann vermelden, dass ich einer der wenigen bin, der eine 100%-Zustimmungsquote hat. Ich habe bisher nur eine einzige Aufgabe zum FIDE-Album eingereicht, ein h#2 noch im letzten Jahrtausend, und diese Aufgabe wurde aufgenommen.
Wenn manche Autoren nicht selber ein Gefühl für die Königsklasse FIDE-Album entwickeln, dann sollte unbedingt gegengesteuert werden.