30 October 2019

2019 Grand Swiss Results

I added the crosstable to my page on the 2019 Grand Swiss; Isle of Man. Still to be done are adding the PGN and updating the Index of Players. In the previous post, 2019 World Cup Regulations, I wrote,

I started the process of adding a crosstable to my page for the 2019 Grand Swiss, which finished this week. While preparing the PGN, I counted 154 players and 841 games. [...] One question I haven't answered is how to update the index of players. I imagine that many players who participated in the Grand Swiss will never play in another World Championship event. Is it worthwhile adding their names to the index? I'll have to count the number of new players before I decide how to proceed.

A preliminary count gave 38 new players, or about 25% of the 154 players who participated. This compares to the 30% (38/128) that I counted a few weeks ago in 2019 World Cup Players. That statistic gives me a green light to add all of the new players to the index. • NB: The qualification paths for the participants are documented in FIDE Chess.com Grand Swiss Preview (chess.com; Peter Doggers).

It's also worth mentioning two previous tournaments that were part of the FIDE World Championship cycle and that used the Swiss system format:-

These were the last Interzonals organized before the knockout format replaced the entire tail-end of the cycle.

23 October 2019

2019 World Cup Regulations

In the previous post, 2019 World Cup Players, I wrote,
It seems that the regulations for the 2019 World Cup were considerably changed from the regulations for the 2017 World Cup, probably due to the change of FIDE management a year ago. I have to spend some time reviewing the changes before I can add a legend to the 2019 page.

The changes were not more extensive than I had expected, so I had no trouble adding the regulations to my page 2019 World Cup, Khanty-Mansiysk. Since I still had some time left after doing this, I started the process of adding a crosstable to my page for the 2019 Grand Swiss, Isle of Man, which finished this week. While preparing the PGN, I counted 154 players and 841 games.

The crosstables for Swiss system tournaments are generally trickier than for round robins or matches. I identified eight players who didn't complete the full 11 rounds and it will take some additional effort to see that they are documented correctly.

One question I haven't answered is how to update the Index of Players. I imagine that many players who participated in the Grand Swiss will never play in another World Championship event. Is it worthwhile adding their names to the index? I'll have to count the number of new players before I decide how to proceed.

16 October 2019

2019 World Cup Players

Following up last week's post on the 2019 World Cup Results, I added the PGN to my page 2019 World Cup, Khanty-Mansiysk. I also added the participants to my page World Chess Championship : Index of players. Of the 128 players who competed, 38 were new names on that index.

It seems that the regulations for the 2019 World Cup were considerably changed from the regulations for the 2017 World Cup, probably due to the change of FIDE management a year ago. I have to spend some time reviewing the changes before I can add a legend to the 2019 page, like I did for the 2017 World Cup, Tbilisi, and for all preceding World Cup pages. I'll do that as soon as I can.

09 October 2019

2019 World Cup Results

I added the crosstable for the recent 2019 World Cup, played at Khanty-Mansiysk (Russia). This was the fifth time the event was held at that location.

For my next post, I'll add the PGN and update the Index of players. In related news, the 2019 Grand Swiss, a new addition to the qualifying events for next year's Candidates tournament is just getting underway.

02 October 2019

Status of the Women's World Championship

For this post I intended to add a new page for the 2019-20 Women's Grand Prix, because the first event, held in Skolkovo (Russia), finished a few weeks ago. When I reviewed the previous post on the Women's Championship, Future of the Women's World Championship (June 2019), I found a question: 'Where is the follow-through describing the next cycle?' Since I still can't answer that question, I decided to abandon the new page for now. On top of FIDE's obsolete documentation, the recent design change of FIDE's web site has rendered many (all?) bookmarks unusable ('404 Page Not Found; The page you were looking for doesn't exist'), making any research problematic.

It's been a little more than 20 years since I started documenting the Women's World Championship. The first occurrence of the page in my archive is dated September 1999, and the first occurrence on Archive.org is dated March 2000. That first page looked like the following screen capture, with only title matches having crosstables.


archive.org/web/*/https://www.m-w.com/chess/wcc-womn.htm

As far as I could tell, that overview had never been done before and, like a jigsaw puzzle, it took some time to piece the record together from different clues. I determined the events under the columns for 'Interzonal' and 'Candidates' by starting with relevant PGN files, looking for games by Women's World Champions. Sometimes the only clue was 'IZ' or 'CT' in the PGN '[Event]' tag. When I found a game, I used the name of the other player to look for more games. Eventually I developed the overall picture. It was partly a hit-or-miss effort, and that March 2000 snapshot is missing a second Interzonal for both the 1976-78 and 1979-81 cycles.

After producing that first draft shown above, I spent the next year or so documenting the various events. It took me over a year to discover that I had overlooked the 1976 Roosendaal Interzonal. After once spending so much time guessing about historical events, I don't want to start guessing about future events. I'll wait until FIDE has published the necessary documents before I tackle the new cycle.