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.