Future of the Women's World Championship

After last week's post, 2019 Women's Candidates Tournament, Kazan, I tied up some loose ends and then tackled the future of the Women's World Chess Championship. Here's what I wrote last week:-

The information about the next cycle is scattered across different documents and, although it's consistent, I couldn't find a single document pulling everything together. [...] There might be a basic document that I've overlooked.

The most important document for understanding FIDE's current direction is the FIDE Handbook. Here's a copy of the World Championship section where I've highlighted the women's events in red.

There are four parts:-

07. Regulations for the Women's World Chess Championship Cycle
08. Regulations for the FIDE Women’s World Championship Match 2019-20
09. Regulations for the 2019-2020 Women's FIDE Grand Prix
10. Rules for the FIDE Women's Candidates Tournament 2019

The first part should cover the entire cycle, but it describes the former system of a knockout championship alternating with a match.

07. Regulations for the Women's World Chess Championship Cycle

1.1. The Women’s World Chess Championship shall be organised annually and qualifying events include the following: National Championships, Zonal Tournaments, Continental Championships, FIDE Women’s Grand Prix and the final stages, the Women’s World Chess Championship Tournament in even years 2018, 2020 etc. (64-player knock out system) and the Women’s World Chess Championship Match (10 games, 2 players) in odd years 2017, 2019, etc.

2. Qualifying events for the Women’s World Chess Championship Tournament (knock out system)...

The other documents describe a future cycle. For example:-

09. Regulations for the 2019-2020 Women's FIDE Grand Prix

2.8. The two players who score the most number of cumulative points in WGP Series qualify to the FIDE Women Candidates Tournament to be held in the first half of 2021.

The next Women's World Cup is scheduled for Minsk, Belarus, starting September 2020. How many players will qualify for the 2021 Candidates Tournament? My guess is two, along with the loser of the forthcoming title match, a couple of seeds based on rating, and an organizer's choice.

The announcement of the women's candidates tournament changed a cycle which was already in progress, a rookie mistake. Where is the follow-through describing the next cycle? Note that the the women's events are not the only problem in the handbook, which currently describes two candidates tournaments in the main WCC cycle.

05. Rules & Regulations for the Candidates Tournament of the FIDE World Championship cycle 2016-2018
[...]
12. Regulations for the FIDE Candidates Tournament 2020

Conclusion: Communication is not the strong point of the current FIDE management. The former FIDE management, despite their many shortcomings, did a better job of documenting their decisions.

2019 Women's Candidates Tournament, Kazan

I added the recently completed 2019 Kazan Candidates Tournament to my index page on the World Chess Championship for Women. This should have been relatively straightforward, but I ran into complications when I tried to understand the structure of the next cycle.

The information about the next cycle is scattered across different documents and, although it's consistent, I couldn't find a single document pulling everything together. The subdomain for womenchess.fide.com is also hopelessly out of date. I'll come back to this at the same time I update the other data -- PGN and the Index of Women Players -- for the Kazan Candidates event. There might be a basic document that I've overlooked.

Zonal Qualifiers C12

In my previous zonal post, Zonal Qualifiers C13-C16 (May 2019), I noted,

I was pleased with the correlation between my data and the ZQP [zonal qualifying paths] data. It was even better than I had hoped for and confirmed my belief that the ZQP data is an excellent source of info on the early FIDE zonals and interzonals.

That gave me a green light to proceed with the earlier World Championship cycles, C01-C12. An overview of C12 is shown in the following chart. It lists the players who competed in the three interzonals for that cycle.

The 1st & 3rd columns are from the ZQP data. The 2nd & 4th columns are from my own pages. The 2nd column shows in which interzonal the player participated and corresponds to the following list:-

• 1I: Las Palmas Interzonal; VII, 1982
• 2I: Moscow Interzonal; IX, 1982
• 3I: Toluca Interzonal; --, 1982

The 4th column corresponds to the zonal numbering on my page (C12) 1981-1984 Zonal Cycle. Players who didn't qualify from a zonal were seeded on other criteria.

2019 Grand Prix, Moscow

I added the crosstable and PGN for the first event in the 2019 Grand Prix. The tournament's logo is shown to the left. For more about the logos for the new Grand Prix, see Magic Beasts Are the Key Visuals for the 2019 Grand Prix Series (worldchess.com).

For more about the current cycle, see FIDE Starts the New Cycle (May 2019). For the last post about the Grand Prix in the previous cycle, see 2017-18 GP (December 2017).