Missing Months

I'm in a holding pattern this week, waiting for a couple of events to finish : (1) the first of the 2017 Grand Prix tournaments, and (2) the 2017 Women's World Championship. Both should finish some time next week, which will keep my Wednesdays busy for a month or so. In the meantime, what to do?

A couple of weeks ago, while working on a post about the 1995-1999 Women's Cycle, I noted,

As long as I'm filling gaps, I should also complete the missing months ('--') in pages like the 1999 Xie Jun - Galliamova match.

Knowing when an event was played is useful to locate tournament reports in chess magazines. A quick search located about 50 events missing months. How long would it take to research those? Maybe an hour or so? Ha!

Tackling the events in chronological order, the first batch was easy enough. Just as in 1927-39 Women's Title Tournaments (September 2009), I used Kazic's 'International Championship Chess' (Batsford 1974), to fill in months for eight women's title matches from 1953 to 1972. Then the exercise became trickier.

The next two events were both from the 1961-63 cycle: the 1962 Stockholm Interzonal and the 1962 Curacao Candidates Tournament. In both cases, the event missing a month was a playoff match. As I started looking into the two matches, I realized that there was more than a missing month to document -- I was lacking basic information on how the playoffs fit into and affected the rest of the cycle. As I looked deeper, I realized that the little project might be spinning out of control. I know from past experience that once I get sidetracked, I risk losing sight of the original goal, so I stopped and simply documented the months the playoffs took place. That will do for now.

I'll come back to the remaining 40 pages missing months some other time. Ditto for the 1961-63 cycle.