04 May 2011

Zonals, Current Cycles, and GM Kamsky

A few weeks ago I linked my index of World Championship Zonals to my pages on the various interzonals (see 'Chess Results' by Gino Di Felice), so it seemed appropriate to make the round trip. I linked the main index page for the World Chess Championship, plus the page on FIDE Events 1948-1990, to the clipping pages for the various zonal cycles.

While I was at it, I added a few doodads to my page on the 2011 Candidates Event, which gets underway this week. I also added a new page for the forthcoming 2011 World Cup. FIDE has said so little about this event that I suppose they are still hammering out the details of the new cycle.

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The May 2011 Chess Life (CL), has an interview titled 'Kamsky on the Record' (p.30), where the USA's second ranked GM mentioned something that didn't seem right to me. Here is an excerpt of the passage, with my apologies for treating it like an image. The editor of CL recently eliminated the HTML version of the magazine and I haven't figured out how to do a text copy/paste.


The sentence that caught my attention was Kamsky saying, 'I was supposed to play the World Champion for the title', where he was talking about his December victory in the 2007 World Cup. According to my page on the 2008-09 Matches, FIDE had already announced in July 2007 that the winner of the World Cup would only get a World Championship match if Kramnik won the double round robin title event at 2007 Mexico City. Anand won that event in October 2007, well before Kamsky won the World Cup. There was never any question of Kamsky playing a title match without first winning an intermediate match.

1 comment:

ebutaljib said...

Hi Mark!

Kamsky is talking about Proposal A from March 2nd 2007.


But this was then changed with Topalov getting a challenger match.

Kamksy is misleading in his comments. It was known long before any player has signed up for World Cup 2007 that the winner will have to play against Topalov first. Proposal A was just an idea that was soon discarded.