26 January 2011

Zonal Cycles 2004-2005 & 2006-2007

Working from FIDE documents published prior to the 2005 & 2007 World Cups at Khanty-Mansiysk, I researched the events for the zonal cycles 2004-2005 and 2006-2007 (cycle no.22 & no.23 in my way of counting), and updated my page on the World Chess Championship Zonals.

19 January 2011

Zonal Cycle 2008-2009 Index

Last year I wrote a post titled Resources for Candidates++ and for Zonals++ with a link to a relevant post, Next World Championship Cycle (rybkaforum.net), authored by a certain ebutaljib. Some time later ebutaljib contacted me to inform me about more of his resources, including 2009 World Cup Qualifiers (forums.ubi.com), with detailed data and links on zonal cycle 2008-2009. I compared his data to mine, made a few additions, and updated my index of World Chess Championship Zonals. Thanks, ebutaljib!

12 January 2011

Fischer in the World Championship

While working on a post for my main blog, The Brady Bunch, I noticed that Frank Brady's book 'Bobby Fischer: Profile of a Prodigy' (Dover 1989), had good summaries of all the zonal events where Fischer participated. I updated the relevant zonal pages with specific page references, combined them with links about Fischer from my World Championship Index of players (A-G), and created the following table. The links to zonal pages are in the 'ZT' column.

Fischer's World Chess Championship Participation
WCCZTIZCTTM
19601957-12; Brady p.20Portoroz 1958Yugoslavia 1959 
19631960-12; Brady p.41Stockholm 1962Curacao 1962 
19661962-12; Brady p.68   
19691965-12; Brady p.92Sousse 1967  
19721969-11; Brady p.155, 173-174Palma de Mallorca 1970Candidate Matches 1971Reykjavik 1972
1975   (1975 Fischer - Karpov)
***
1992   (1992 Fischer - Spassky)

The left column 'WCC' is the year when the corresponding title match was played. The right column 'TM' shows the title matches where Fischer had a role. I've included the 1992 Fischer - Spassky rematch in the TM column to avoid creating another column. I don't believe that anyone except Fischer considered that match to have been for a recognized title.

05 January 2011

Current Events

Catching up on current events, I added the participants from the 2010 Women's World Championship to the Index of Women Players for all Women's World Championship events. I also added recent FIDE announcements to my page on the 2010 2011 Candidates Event.

Date changes, format changes, venue changes... Has FIDE ever managed a world class event less impressively than the forthcoming candidates event? Furthermore, almost six years have passed since Kasparov retired from professional chess, clearing the way for FIDE to take full control of the World Championship, and there is still no roadmap for a stable cycle.