Blog Follow-ups, WCC Style

Following the lead from my main blog, Blog Follow-ups, I added a tag for posts on this blog that require a follow-up. The idea is to keep track of them, and after I follow-up (if ever), delete the tag from the original post. After going through various references that I've maintained offline, I discovered 11 such posts. The number will vary.

Stats for Index Pages

When I looked at correspondence chess a few weeks ago in CC 2016, I decided,

Before I update my page, I'm going to look at some statistics to measure the interest in this topic. It might be sufficient to provide ZIP files as I now do for the World Chess Championship : Computer Chess.

I've had a new stats package running on the site since last summer -- see New Stats for M-W.com (October 2015) for details -- which is enough time to account for temporary anomalies. I set the time period to cover six months (November 2015 - April 2016), loaded those results into a database, and analyzed them. The following table shows the results for each of the main index pages.

Since the page receiving the most views is the site's main index page, I calculated views on the other pages as a fraction relative to that index page. For example, the table shows that the page covering events for 'FIDE 1948-1990' gets 18 views for each 100 views that the main page gets.

World Championship	Views per 100 'Main Index' Pages	Link
Main Index	100	WCC-INDX.HTM
FIDE 1948-1990	18	WCC-INDY.HTM
Pre-FIDE	10	WCC-INDZ.HTM
Women	8	WCC-WOMN.HTM
Zonals	6	WCC-ZONL.HTM
Computers	6	WCC-COMP.HTM
Correspondence	4	WCC-CORR.HTM

I was happy to see that women's events and zonals received a decent number of views and this was confirmed by the stats for the individual pages in those topics. Stats for the pages on correspondence chess showed fewer views, indicating less interest in that topic. I'll stop creating separate pages for new events in World Chess Championship : Correspondence Chess and will provide ZIP files only.

2015-2016 Women's Grand Prix, Batumi

I added the crosstable and PGN for the third event in the 2015-2016 Women's Grand Prix, held at Batumi (Georgia). The previous event was 2015-2016 Women's Grand Prix, Tehran.

I'm not sure what happens next in this Grand Prix series. My page, 2015-2016 FIDE Women's Grand Prix, gives the rules as they were announced in August 2015. The fourth and next event was to be the last. It is listed on the FIDE calendar as:-

Women's FIDE Grand Prix Series; Chengdu, China; 1-Jul-2016 to 15-Jul-2016

Under 2016, the calendar also lists, without start or end dates, another event:-

Women's FIDE Grand Prix Series; Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia

This supports a curious article posted on Chess-news.ru, that I give here via Google Translate: Grand Prix women's new member, the new rules. Among other news, it mentions,

On the FIDE Presidential Board, held in Moscow during the Candidates Tournament, it was decided to change the format already ongoing series and instead of originally planned four stages to organize five.

This is confirmed by List of Decisions of the 2016 1st quarter FIDE PB (fide.com; 13 April 2016):-

1PB-2016/14. To recommend the bid of the Khanty-Mansiysk for 2020 Olympiad, 2019 World Chess Cup, 2018 Women’s World Chess Championship and 2016 Women’s Grand-Prix tournament for the approval, should there be no other bids at the deadline.

As far as I can see, none of this has been documented in FIDE's 'Handbook > D. Regulations for Specific Competitions > 09. Regulations for the 2015-2016 Women's FIDE Grand-Prix'. Business as usual at FIDE?

Correspondence Chess 2016

Hmmm. It seems the last time I looked at correspondence chess was Small Projects for 2015 (January 2015), where I already had two World Championship finals to add to my page on the World Chess Championship : Correspondence Chess. Since that post another final has ended, meaning that I am seriously behind on ICCF events. Here's a recap of the current status, including new events, with links to ICCF.com:-

• WC25/final, 'Latest results from 4/18/2013'
• WC26/final, 'Latest results from 6/27/2015'
• WC27/final, 'Latest results from 5/9/2014'
• WC28/final, Two games left, but the winner is known.
• WC29/final, 'The start date was 6/20/2015'

Before I update my page, I'm going to look at some statistics to measure the interest in this topic. It might be sufficient to provide ZIP files as I now do for the World Chess Championship : Computer Chess.