Notes on the Women's Championship

While working on last week's post, Interview with Dvorkovich (October 2020), I noted a couple of points concerning the Women's World Championship. Both were in the two excerpts of the interview in English on Chesstech.org. The first was in Part 1: FIDE’s next steps:-

Dvorkovich is concerned about the next World Cup and Women’s World Cup, that were supposed to take place in Minsk in summer 2021 respectively spring 2022: "The World Cups have never been popular among organisers. The players love them, the audience loves them, but it’s a nightmare for the hosts. We are looking for a way to allow all players that qualified to play and at the same time make the life of organisers easier, the events shorter and more spectacular."

That explains why, for the last few cycles, the unrestricted version of the World Cup has always been given to the organizer of the Olympiad. If you want the Olympiad, you have to organize the World Cup in the preceding year. It also explains why the Women’s World Cup was called a World Championship -- it added prestige to the event. The second point was in Part 2: "I am not used to discussing politics":-

After two hours Dubov ran out of questions and asked if Dvorkovich wanted to address anything else. The FIDE President was still agile and raised several issues: The promotion of women by aligning their world championship cycle with the men and providing more playing opportunities. [...]

This reminded me of my current pet peeve regarding the 2019 Women's Title Match (February 2020). After the match, played in January 2020, I observed,

[My page on the match] included a short explanation about the change of regulations that went into effect between the time they were announced and the time the match was played. It's a pity that FIDE still hasn't updated the obsolete regulations, especially since the announcement of the change is buried in the Fide.com Archive.

Nine months later, FIDE still hasn't documented the cycle. The top section of the image below shows the table of contents for the FIDE handbook at the time of the match. Chapters 7 and 12 have since been removed. The other chapters have been renumbered, but their content hasn't changed. FIDE recently announced two more pieces of the current cycle for the Women's World Championship:-

• 2020-10-22: Gibraltar to host the final stage of FIDE Women’s Grand Prix
• 2020-10-22: Bidding procedure for FIDE Grand Swiss & FIDE Women’s Grand Swiss 2021

Both of the Grand Swiss tournaments are described in 'Draft Regulations'. That gives us no regulations describing the entire current cycle, especially the candidates tournament, *plus* draft regulations for a new event that qualifies into the candidates tournament and that is already in the bidding stage. C'mon FIDE; you should be able to do better than that. Anyway, here is the list of documents that were available at the beginning of the year.

While I'm on the subject of women's chess, I have a small change to the Index of Women Players. The Vikipedija page for Eva Karakasa (lv.wikipedia.org) links to five of my pages for the Women's World Championship. The first link is to the 1955 Candidates Tournament, where 'Karakas' is not found. The second link is to the 1959 Candidates Tournament, where we find '07 Karakas'. The other three pages also list 'Karakas'.

The bottom section of the image above, from Jeremy Gaige's 'Chess Personalia', explains the discrepancy. In the 1955 Candidates event we find '14 Kertesz', and assume that she must have remarried between the 1955 and the 1959 events. I updated the 'Index of Women Players' accordingly.