C31 Zonals++ More Data

In the previous post, C31 Zonal Qualification Paths (February 2024), I wrote,

There are many names missing on the new page. I'll come back later and try to fill in the blanks.

That 'new page' is (C31) Zonal Qualifiers 2022-2023 (m-w.com). I created a database and loaded two sources for data into it:-

• Players who were listed in FIDE's document 'FIDE World Cup 2023: Preliminary lists of eligible players announced' (125 players); see C31 Regulations for World Cup Qualifiers (November 2023), for a link to the document.
• Players who participated at 'FIDE World Cup 2023' (Baku; 206 players).

I determined that of the 125 players in the 'Preliminary lists of eligible players', 11 did not play at Baku. Of the 206 players who played at Baku, 89 were not in the preliminary list. That made 100 names to investigate, which is too many. I turned to the Wikipedia page, Chess World Cup 2023, for help.

The Wikipedia page lists all 206 players who participated in Baku, along with their qualification paths. When I compared FIDE's list of players to Wikipedia's list, I had 35 mismatches. Most of these were due to the usual difficulties with comparing names -- letters specific to a language, Asian names, Spanish names -- along with one real difference in spelling: Aleksandar Indic / Indjic of Serbia. After correcting those mismatches, the lists matched almost perfectly.

From the Wikipedia data, I derived a few counts, summarized in the following chart. The left column shows federations that had more than three players at Baku, out of a total of 86 different federations with at least one player.

The right column shows the counts of players who qualified via a zonal. The middle column shows the counts of players who qualified via a route other than a zonal. Most of the non-zonal codes are easily understood; 'WC' means the 2021 World Cup at Sochi.

It looks like I'll need another post on this subject to incorporate the Wikipedia data into the other data. I'll come back to this another time.