2012 Women's World Championship, Players

Finishing with my two previous posts, 2012 Women's World Championship and Knockout Format KOed?, I added the participants in the 2012 FIDE Knockout Matches to the Index of Women Players.

Three posts to finish one page?! I must be slipping.

2012-2013 Grand Prix, Tashkent

I added the crosstable and PGN for the 2012 Tashkent event to my page on the 2012-2013 Grand Prix. After the 2012 London event, this is the second of six events. According to the FIDE calendar, the third event will take place in Lisbon starting April 2013.

Media coverage for Tashkent was considerably more subdued than for London, perhaps because the organizer, Agon, has not yet hit full stride. The Candidates Matches for the current cycle, to be held in March 2013 in London, and the Lisbon leg of the next cycle's Grand Prix will show us what Agon is capable of doing.

Knockout Format KOed?

Finishing up with last week's post on the 2012 Women's World Championship, I added records of the individual matches to my page on the Women's 2012 FIDE Knockout Matches. The last task was to add an issue date to my link for the 'Regulations' for the event. I keep track of FIDE announcements on the World Championship, but for this event I had nothing.

I couldn't find an announcement on the FIDE site, but I did find something related on Chessvibes.com: Hou Yifan starts new Women GP with 4/4, dated August 2011. The search also led me to a page on YifanHou.net, titled Women's World Chess Championship 2012, a site/blog not administered by the former Women's World Champion, but by an admirer. The page starts,

The "new" FIDE Regulations for the Women’s World Chess Championship Cycle have caused some serious amazement among the insiders of the chess scene.

Later it gets heavier.

It has to be mentioned again and again that these regulations apply exclusively in women's chess. Ilyumzhinov seems to be too much a miserable coward to involve the men's championship since the resistance would blow him out of his presidency when Anand loses his first round match against one of the African stars.

This is close to what happened in the 2012 Women's Championship, when all of the top seeds were eliminated in the second round. More pages in the same style can be found using the search 'site:yifanhou.net inurl:uncensored'. It's good to know that some keen observers of the international chess scene are paying close attention to women's chess. Despite the deficiencies of the current format, congratulations are due to Anna Ushenina, the new Women's World Champion.

2012 Women's World Championship

I added the recently completed Women's World Championship, aka 2012 FIDE Knockout Matches, to my page on the World Chess Championship for Women. The page on the matches is only a stub, because I ran into a number of small technical problems and ran out of time. I'll complete it as soon as I can.