Boston Grand Prix Exhibit Judging Debacle

What I would like to see as a fix is that all, every one of the exhibitor frame fees be refunded due to the mishandling of the exhibit competition. That alone will prevent this from ever happening again especially if the APS must advance the money to refund frame fees. If the APS can't recover financially, so be it. Perhaps then the APS can sue the judges personally for compensation.

Edit: added two missing "h"-s.

Was it the APS or the FIP that was guilty of this poor judgement?

Ehh? This has nothing to do with the APS. Why should they bear any financial burden having to do with this? This is in the FIP, specifically one person.

It was the judges who are accredited by one or both organization. If it was the FIP competitors, just refund their frame fees from the Boston Expo 2026 moneys. If Boston Expo 2026 can't cover it, the is what bankruptcy court is for. Such a filing will force the reporting of what individuals, if any, and organization or organizations are on the hook for the show expenses. The frame money was collected under fraudulent circumstances, a promise of a competition which was falsified.

And then never invite the FIP back to any US show and expel Dr. McCann from organized US philately.

I doubt that refunding the frame fees to the people who were passed over would matter. That would not institute the changes necessary in exhibiting. That has to come from refusing to deal with FIP. As for Dr. McCann, as I said before, I have heard rumors to that effect.

BTW, it wasn't only the top exhibits that had problems. There were two 9X1 exhibits, one was Very Very Good, and the other was Very Very Very Good. But the Very Very Good exhibit won the higher award. I was told that even the exhibitor was shocked by it. And I saw both (I am fond of this stamp), and the result should certainly have been reversed. But…….

It sounds like both were great 9X1 exhibits. One will never know, but I am less inclined to think that award were as a result of any behind-the-scenes shenanigans.

More likely one exhibit lost points for some technical faults that an ordinary viewer wouldn't notice. Things like a poor choice of fonts, inconsistent font size, wrong paper size, wrong paper color, etc. could be a factor for a nit-picky judge. I haven't read the FIP rule book but there may be specific gotchas in there that most exhibitors wouldn't think of.

Also it is not just the quality and scarcity of the material that matters, the better scoring exhibit may have told a better story, or taught the judges something new, while the losing exhibit did not.

I'm not criticizing your expertise, just that surprises like this happen in judging all the time. In some ways I wish the judges notes and score sheets were published so we could all understand the reasoning and do better next time.

The person who lost also had an exhibit in the Court of Honor, he is a long time exhibitor with many medals. This was not due to points lost because of fonts or other exhibit issues. Either the judges were ignorant or someone was not liked.

Zebra - you don't get to this level and suddenly make some gotcha mistake. These are seasoned exhibitors. No zebra stripes on a donkey.

Understood. Point taken.

My theory was that the FIP scoring at this show had stricter rules about presentation versus his previous awards, and the exhibitor didn't feel like reworking his entire exhibit just to meet a technicality in a different rulebook, so he got dinged for it. You're right, at this level, that should not happen.