Zonal Cycles 2004-2005 & 2006-2007

Working from FIDE documents published prior to the 2005 & 2007 World Cups at Khanty-Mansiysk, I researched the events for the zonal cycles 2004-2005 and 2006-2007 (cycle no.22 & no.23 in my way of counting), and updated my page on the World Chess Championship Zonals.

Zonal Cycle 2008-2009 Index

Last year I wrote a post titled Resources for Candidates++ and for Zonals++ with a link to a relevant post, Next World Championship Cycle (rybkaforum.net), authored by a certain ebutaljib. Some time later ebutaljib contacted me to inform me about more of his resources, including 2009 World Cup Qualifiers (forums.ubi.com), with detailed data and links on zonal cycle 2008-2009. I compared his data to mine, made a few additions, and updated my index of World Chess Championship Zonals. Thanks, ebutaljib!

Fischer in the World Championship

While working on a post for my main blog, The Brady Bunch, I noticed that Frank Brady's book 'Bobby Fischer: Profile of a Prodigy' (Dover 1989), had good summaries of all the zonal events where Fischer participated. I updated the relevant zonal pages with specific page references, combined them with links about Fischer from my World Championship Index of players (A-G), and created the following table. The links to zonal pages are in the 'ZT' column.

Fischer's World Chess Championship Participation

WCC	ZT	IZ	CT	TM
1960	1957-12; Brady p.20	Portoroz 1958	Yugoslavia 1959
1963	1960-12; Brady p.41	Stockholm 1962	Curacao 1962
1966	1962-12; Brady p.68
1969	1965-12; Brady p.92	Sousse 1967
1972	1969-11; Brady p.155, 173-174	Palma de Mallorca 1970	Candidate Matches 1971	Reykjavik 1972
1975				(1975 Fischer - Karpov)
***
1992				(1992 Fischer - Spassky)

The left column 'WCC' is the year when the corresponding title match was played. The right column 'TM' shows the title matches where Fischer had a role. I've included the 1992 Fischer - Spassky rematch in the TM column to avoid creating another column. I don't believe that anyone except Fischer considered that match to have been for a recognized title.

Current Events

Catching up on current events, I added the participants from the 2010 Women's World Championship to the Index of Women Players for all Women's World Championship events. I also added recent FIDE announcements to my page on the 2010 2011 Candidates Event.

Date changes, format changes, venue changes... Has FIDE ever managed a world class event less impressively than the forthcoming candidates event? Furthermore, almost six years have passed since Kasparov retired from professional chess, clearing the way for FIDE to take full control of the World Championship, and there is still no roadmap for a stable cycle.