C30 Regulations for World Cup Qualifiers

After catching up with current events in the previous post, Upcoming World Championship Events (October 2021), there remains one more action from 2021 Women's World Cup Crosstables (September 2021):-

For those in-between weeks with nothing special to report, I'll document the zonals for the current cycle, C30. Here are a few corresponding references for the previous cycle, C29. [...]

Here is the complete list of corresponding references:-

• 2019-09-18: C29 Regulations for World Cup Qualifiers
• 2019-09-25: C29 Zonals
• 2019-11-13: C29 Zonals Indexed
• 2019-11-20: C29 Zonal Clippings
• 2019-12-04: C29 Zonal Qualification Paths
• 2020-03-04: C29 Zonal Rating Reports
• 2020-03-11: C29 Zonal Links

The qualifiers for the recent 2021 World Cup, Sochi (m-w.com) were published in Players lists and full pairings of FIDE World Cups published (fide.com; June 2021). The following chart, similar to the one developed for 'C29 Regulations', shows the various qualification paths for the World Cup plus the number of players qualifying via that path.

The numbers in parentheses, e.g. 'World Cup 2019 (4)', show the number of players authorized for that path by the regulations. That allows a quick calculation to check the number authorized by more complicated paths. For example, 'Americas Continental (20)' equals 8 players from that tournament plus 12 players from the zonals 2.x.

I noticed only one discrepancy, 'European Continental (47)', where the actual count in the chart totals to 48. This turned out to be an error on my part; 'Zone 1.10' produced only one qualifier, not two as shown in the original chart.

That error was caused by my erroneous manipulation of the data for players marked 'withdrew'. There were 17 such players, out of the 214 players listed as qualified.

It's worth noting that all of the players qualified by 'African Continental (4)' were from 'EGY' (Egypt). There were no African zonals 4.x in the current cycle. In the line marked 'Other (*)', the asterisk stands for:-

FIDE President’s wild cards [4], replacements of missing federation’s nominees [6], and Zonal 3.5 [2].

The four players nominated by the FIDE President were listed in the FIDE announcement from June 2021. In addition to the 17 players marked 'withdrew', six federations were missing a name under 'Federation Nominees (91)'.

The 19 events listed in the right column will be the subject of future posts. The covid coronvirus created havoc with qualifying events for the cycle C30. I hope I don't fall into any more traps along the way.

Upcoming World Championship Events

After finally finishing with the most recent events in the World Championship, as documented in 2021 World Cup Wrapup (October 2021), it's time to move on to future events. One of the posts in the World Cup series, 2021 Women's World Cup Crosstables (September 2021), laid down a small follow-up plan:-

After that, I'll catch up with the latest news for two upcoming events:-
* 2021 Grand Swiss; 25 Oct - 8 Nov, and
* 2021 Carlsen - Nepomniachtchi; 24 Nov - 16 Dec

I identified recent announcements from Fide.com and updated two of my pages (both m-w.com):-

• 2021 Grand Swiss; Riga (Latvia), X-XI, 2021
• 2021 Carlsen - Nepomniachtchi; Dubai, XI-XII, 2021

I also noted some changes required to bring the pages behind World Championship for Women up to date. I'll tackle those for my next post.

While looking for relevant info, I noticed two different banners for the Grand Swiss events, shown below. The first banner appears to have been discarded in favor of the second, which is the model for the logo shown at the top of this post.

2021 World Cup Wrapup

In the previous post -- see the last entry in the table below, 'Player Indices', for a link and see that post for links to the two World Cup pages under discussion -- I promised to add PGN files to both pages. Done & done.

Before adding the PGN, I cleaned up some name mismatches. The discussion after the table provides some details. The table summarizes the effort required to document a World Cup on my site, where I always build a page from the PGN game scores for the event. The table covers two recent World Cup events held concurrently: (1) unrestricted by gender, and (2) women only.

Post	U	W
2021-08-04: TWIC Documents Chess History	Y	Y
2021-08-11: A New Cycle Is Evolving	Y	Y
2021-08-18: 2021 World Cup Tiebreak	Y	-
2021-08-25: 2021 World Cup [Name] Mismatches	Y	-
2021-09-15: 2021 World Cup Crosstables	Y	-
2021-09-22: 2021 Women's World Cup Preparation	-	Y
2021-09-29: 2021 Women's World Cup Crosstables	-	Y
2021-10-06: 2021 World Cup Player Indices	Y	Y

In brief, here are the steps required for each event:-

• Collect the PGN for an event
• Prepare the PGN according to my preferences
• Create a text file with the structure for the event
• Convert the text file to HTML
• Add the players to the index of of players
• Add the PGN to the page for the event

While the steps are largely automated, they require constant supervision because of various booby traps at each step. As for name mismatches between the official site and the PGN delivered for the event, I discovered a half-dozen:-

Unrestricted event
- Ali / Salih
- Elarbi/ Elarabi
- Gareev / Gareyev
- Iyti / Eiti

Women only
- Bhakti Kulkarni / Kulkarni Bhakti
- Medina / Aulia

I've incorporated my decision for each name on the pages holding the player indices. I hope I've been consistent with previous decisions.

2021 World Cup Player Indices

In last week's post, 2021 Women's World Cup Crosstables (September 2021), I ended with an action:-

As for the PGN and the 'Index of Players', the same task needs to be done for the concurrent event already documented in '2021 World Cup Crosstables' (September 2021).

The two events were:-

• 2021 World Cup, Sochi (Russia), VII-VIII, 2021, and the concurrent
• 2021 FIDE Women's World Cup

I updated the respective indices that cover all World Chess Championship (WCC) events since the 19th century:-

• Index of Players
• Index of Women Players

The unrestricted event included 200 players, of which 122 were veterans of other WCC events, and 78 were competing for the first time in a WCC event. In an earlier post on Sochi, 2021 World Cup Tiebreak (August 2021), I noted that the regulations specified 206 players: 156 players in round 1, joined by 50 top seeds in round 2. The same post explained that 'The difference of six players stems from six first round matches that were not played.'

The women's event included 101 players, of which 57 were veterans of women's events and 44 were competing for the first time. How does this compare with the regulations? Here I ran into a problem. I had regulations for 'Women’s World Cup 2020' and for 'Women’s World Cup 2022', both downloaded February 2020, which was pre-covid pandemic.

Digging deeper, I discovered that FIDE released 'Regulations for the FIDE Women’s World Cup 2021' in June 2021, a month before the event took place. That document specified that 78 players in round 1 were to be joined by 25 top seeds in round 2, for a total of 103 players. The difference of two players (103 in the regulations vs. 101 who actually played) was again accounted by two first round matches that were not played.

I spent so much time researching those numeric mismatches that I was unable to tackle the PGN. I'll do that for my next post, along with a second look at 2021 World Cup Name Mismatches (August 2021), where I wrote,

Other mismatches had to do with the spelling of player's names on TWIC and on the official site. Although I resolved the name mismatches, I ran out of time to go further. I'll document the mismatches at the appropriate place.

In retrospect, I think I made a mistake trying to document both Sochi events at the same time. The result has been a process that has dragged out for too long, with neither event fully documented. The upcoming Grand Swiss will also have concurrent tournaments. I'll try a different approach for those.

***

Later: Re 'two first round matches that were not played', the players who forfeited those matches are listed here:-

Ovezdurdiyeva (Badelka)
Paramzina (Bhakti)

Their opponents, whose names are listed in parentheses, advanced to the second round.