19 February 2020

The GSC : Whither the World Championship?

GSC stands for 'Global Strategy Commission'. In the previous post, The Missing Link : Whither the World Championship?, I quoted its chairman,
GM Emil Sutovsky: 'Starting from the next Candidates tournament and World Championship match, everything passes under the direct control of FIDE, so FIDE will be in charge of all these events, regaining control.'

That control is the responsibility of the GSC, under the supervision of FIDE top management. What has the commission been doing since January 2019? Its website, gsc.fide.com, carries two reports, both available since October 2019. The first report was titled 'Second GSC Meeting', which took place in Wijk aan Zee at the end of January 2019. The first six bullets of the 19-point meeting summary were:-

1. Concrete steps approaching corporate world and VIPs
2. World Championship Match Format
3. Bidding procedure for the World Championship Match
4. Qualification for the Candidates Tournament 2020
5. Average Rating Range to determinate the qualifiers by Rating to the World Cup 2019
6. World Cup 2021 format ['Number of participants -- 206.']
[...]
* All decisions are subject of approval by PB.

I covered some of that (and more) in a pair of posts:-

In April, GM Sutovsky gave a long interview to Chesspro.ru in Russian: 'FIDE Between the Past and the Future', Part 1 & Part 2. My online translator gives the introduction as:-

Emil Sutovsky, grandmaster and long-time president of the Association of Chess Professionals (ACP), has been the Director General of the International Chess Federation or FIDE for six months. The position is new - not only for him, but also for FIDE itself, previously it did not exist in an explicit form. De facto Emil is one of the most active and influential figures in the chess world. He is also a popular blogger, in his Facebook regularly speaks on a variety of topics.

Finally we have the undated two-page report mentioned on my main blog in Spectating the 90th FIDE Congress? (February 2020). I hope we'll learn more from the 90th Congress, although based on recent performance it might take a long time before anything is formally announced.

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