A New Cycle Is Struggling to Survive

It's been two years since FIDE restructured its World Championship qualifiers, as I documented in FIDE Starts the New Cycle (May 2019; 'I added three new pages to my site for the World Chess Championship'), meaning it's time to start the next cycle. Although the coronavirus pandemic has played havoc with tournament plans, the FIDE Calendar shows that many qualifying events are already scheduled. The following table gives an overview of those events.

Source: FIDE Calendar
[World Events 2021]
Candidates Tournaments	Yekaterinburg, Russia	19 Apr	28 Apr
FIDE World Cup	Sochi, Russia	10 Jul	03 Aug
FIDE Women's World Cup 2021	Sochi, Russia	10 Jul	06 Aug
FIDE Chess.com Grand Swiss and Women’s Grand Swiss 2021	Isle of Man	25 Oct	08 Nov
FIDE World Chess Championship	Dubai, UAE	24 Nov	16 Dec
[Europe]
European Hybrid Qualification event for the FIDE World Cup	Online	22 May	30 May
[Americas]
('No Data')
[Asia]
Asian Continental Open Chess Championship	Hybrid	20 May	30 May
Zone 3.1 Zonal Open Championship	Hybrid	01 Jun	09 Jun
Zone 3.2 Zonal Open Championship	Dhaka, Bangladesh	01 Jun	09 Jun
Zone 3.3 Zonal Open Championship	Hybrid	01 May	10 May
Zone 3.4 Zonal Open Championship	Tashkent, Uzbekistan	06 May	15 May
Zone 3.7 Zonal Open Championship	India	2021	2021
[Africa]
2021 African Online World Cup Pre-Qualifying Chess Championship	Tornelo Platform	23 Apr	02 May
African Individual Chess Championship 2021 (Open & Women)	Lilongwe, Malawi	17 May	28 May
Zone 4.1 Individual Chess Championship 2021 (Open & Women)	Algiers, Algeria	29 Oct	06 Nov
Zone 4.2 Individual Chess Championship 2021 (Open & Women)	Lomé, Togo	03 Sep	11 Sep
Zone 4.3 Individual Chess Championship 2021 (Open & Women)	Libreville, Gabon	01 Oct	09 Oct
Zone 4.4 Individual Chess Championship 2021 (Open & Women)	Kigali, Rwanda	27 Aug	04 Sep
Zone 4.5 Individual Chess Championship 2021 (Open & Women)	Maseru, Lesotho	05 Nov	13 Nov

[World Events 2021] - My most recent posts on these subjects were:-

• 2021-03-03: Candidates Tournament, Final Chapter?
• 2021-02-01: Expo 2020 Dubai (in 2021); WCC

[Europe] - See also European hybrid qualification tournament for the FIDE World Cup (chessbase.com), which starts,

The European Hybrid Qualification Tournament for the FIDE World Cup will take place on May 22-30 and will be played Online as a hybrid event. 36 players will qualify for the FIDE World Cup 2021. The event will be played under a knock-out system with matches consisting of 2 standard games plus tiebreaks if needed.

[Americas] - The calendar section of the FIDE America site returns an error message: '404 Error : Article not found'. A recent page, Participants in the World Cup, says,

FIDE has asked the Continents to send the names of the participants in the World Cup before May 31st, 2021, also approving to organize Continental Hybrid Championships where no titles will be granted.

[Asia] - Zone 3.5 is missing. Zone 3.6 was covered on 2021 Oceania Zonal (chessexpress.blogspot.com). That kickoff post explained,

The 2021 Oceania Zonal is now going ahead as a 'hybrid' event. This means that the players will be playing online, but supervised by an in place arbiter. Due to the logistics of organising such an event, it will be a round robin tournament, with 1 player per country, except Australia, who can nominate 2 players.

[Africa] - I first mentioned the new zone 4.5 in FIDE Details the New Cycle (May 2019).

For more about the hybrid format, see my recent post FIDE Hybrid Competitions: 'In a few months we'll learn how well this works for World Championship qualifiers.' The experience started with zone 3.6.