Zonals 1984-87, 87-90, & 90-93

Over the past few months there has been so much happening with the World Championship that I almost forgot about an unfinished job last documented in the post Zonals 1978-81 & 1981-84. I added crosstables etc. from a number of Informants to the following pages on the World Chess Championship Zonals:-

• Zonals 1984-87
  
• Zonals 1987-90
  
• Zonals 1990-93

There remains some info in the Informants that I haven't used yet, mainly from the lists of which tournaments were included in the rating calculations for the period covered by the Informant. These are factually so bare that there only worth is to verify when and where an event was played. I'll include these if I can't find any better sources.

2009-2010 Women's Grand Prix, Ulan Bator

I added Ulan Bator (aka Ulaanbaatar), Mongolia to my page on the 2009-2010 FIDE Women's Grand Prix. Linked from that page is the official site where I noticed that the final crosstable had a column titled 'Res.' that I couldn't remember seeing before. I thought it might have something to do with tiebreak and found the following in the FIDE handbook, Regulations for the 2009-2010 Women’s FIDE Grand-Prix:

16. Closing Ceremony of each tournament: The Closing Ceremony shall take place according to schedule. The Organizer shall provide three trophies to the first three placed players. In each tournament, if two or more players tie for first place, the tie to decide the awarding of the trophies will be broken (in descending order) by 1. Direct encounter, 2. Sonneborn Berger Score, 3. Koya System

The column 'Res.' corresponds to what I understand by 'Direct encounter', i.e. the total result of games played between players having the same final score. My crosstables show the 'Sonneborn Berger' tiebreak in the 'T/B' column, while the 'Koya System' is described in another section of the handbook: Annex to the FIDE Tournament Regulations regarding tiebreaks.

The Koya System for Round Robin Tournaments • This is the number of points achieved against all opponents who have achieved 50 % or more.

The tiebreak has no effect on the calculation of Grand Prix points. It is only used to award trophies.

Resources for Candidates++ and for Zonals++

Following up Database for Chess History, I decided that my first conversion would be 'Statistics for my WCC site', as documented in the post Access to Referrers. During this exercise, an interesting page titled Next world championship cycle (rybkaforum.net), popped out. I wrote,

On the referring page are some nice images giving a graphical overview of the candidate matches starting in 1965. I hadn't seen them before and suppose they are from Wikipedia or similar. Finding those made the whole exercise worthwhile; one of these days I might try to locate the original source.

It didn't take long to establish that the graphical overviews were not from Wikipedia. The following image compares one newly discovered graphic with Wikipedia's page World Chess Championship 1966.

After a little sleuth work, I located the originals on Mr. > Office > Chess History > World Championship, under the directory labelled '1964-1966'. Their creator has also published a Silverlight show at World Championship Cycles - Windows Live, using all of the material under the previous link. The crosstables are very nice work and deserve a better framework. Talk about hiding your lamp under a bushel basket!

***

Another resource I discovered during the same exercise, but did not include in 'Access to Referrers' was Caissa Schach Chronik - Ergebnisse und Tabellen der Geschichte, a German language site. Under the WM tab are entries covering each of the FIDE cycles, including zonals. For example, the page for the zonals played as part of the first complete FIDE cycle is here: WM 1951 Setzliste und Ergebnisse der Zonenturniere. There is lots of material here to compare with my own page on the subject, World Chess Championship Zonals.

Database for Chess History

Since I'm still blocked from creating new crosstables, as I discussed in 2009-2010 Women's Grand Prix, Jermuk (Not!), it was time to take positive action. The Women’s Grand Prix in Ulaanbaatar will soon be finishing and I'll need to do an update when it does. After doing the necessary homework, I ordered a copy of Microsoft Access 2010, which should arrive in a few days.

While waiting, I decided to catalog my existing databases to see which would be priorities for conversion. I found around 200 databases scattered all over the personal directory of my hard drive, some pertaining to a single event, like a FIDE World Cup, some much larger. The largest databases cover the following areas.

• Bibliography
  
• Chess960
  
• Notable events
  
• Notable persons
  
• Ratings
  
• Soviet school
  
• Statistics for my WCC site
  
• Zonals

After I install the new database software, it will be a good time to convert the entire set of databases into a single integrated database for chess history. MS Access offers some functionality for maintaining the data on the Web, but I doubt I'll have the resources to do that. On to the redesign...