2013 London CT Player Records

In just two months, eight of the world's best players will meet in a double round robin to select a challenger for World Champion Anand later this year. How have these players fared against each other in the past? The asterisks ('*') in the following crosstable link to the games played by each pair of players as recorded at Chessgames.com. The players' names link to the corresponding FIDE Card.

	Ara	Car	Gel	Gri	Iva	Kra	Rad	Svi
Aronian	xx	*	*	*	*	*	*	*
Carlsen		xx	*	*	*	*	*	*
Gelfand			xx	*	*	*	*	*
Grischuk				xx	*	*	*	*
Ivanchuk					xx	*	*	*
Kramnik						xx	*	*
Radjabov							xx	*
Svidler								xx

Comparing this crosstable with the last time I posted a similar exercise, 2007 Mexico WCC Player Records, five players appeared in both events. Disappearing from 2007 Mexico are Anand, Leko, and Morozevich. Appearing at 2013 London are Carlsen, Ivanchuk, and Radjabov.

2013 a Zonal Year

The FIDE Calendar 2013 currently lists the following WCC events (excluding the Grand Prix) scheduled for the coming year.

C25:
	Candidates Matches	London, England	14-Mar-2013
	World Championship Match		6-Nov-2013
C26:
1.0	European Individual Championship 2013	Legnica, Poland	4-May-2013
2.0	American Continental Championship 2013	Bolivia
2.1	American Zonal	USA
2.2	American Zonal	Canada
2.3	American Zonal	Ecuador
3.0	Asian Continental Championships 2013	Astana, Kazakhstan
3.1	Asian Zonal	Doha, Qatar	1-May-2013
3.2	Asian Zonal	Colombo, Sri Lanka	2-Feb-2013
3.3	Asian Zonal	Tagaytay, Philippines	21-Jan-2013
3.4	Asian Zonal	Osh, Kyrgyzstan	6-Jun-2013
3.6	Asian Zonal	Suva, Fiji	4-May-2013
>>	World Cup 2013	Tromso, Norway	10-Aug-2013
FIDE:
	1st Quarter 2013 Presidential Board	Tsakhkadzor, Armenia	18-Jan-2013
	84th FIDE Congress	Hatay, Turkey	16-Sep-2013

The C26 zonal events will eventually be shown on my pages for the World Chess Championship Zonals and Zonals : Links (and Other References).

What Is Going on Here?

Just before Christmas, Chessvibes.com reported, Bulgarian Chess Federation vs FIDE at CAS: case (partially) dismissed, where CAS stands for Court of Arbitration for Sport.

The requests filed by the Bulgarian Chess Federation on 22 October against the Fédération International des Echecs [...] are dismissed.

At the center of the Bulgarian complaint was FIDE's right to award future World Championship events to Agon. If the Chessvibes' article had been about nothing more than this, I wouldn't mention it here, but there was much more. Most important was the revelation that Agon had still not paid a cash deposit to FIDE of $500.000. The article quoted Nigel Freeman, Executive Director of FIDE:-

Obviously we would like it but, you know, we're in discussions with Agon about it. But their cashflow... because Chelyabinsk was cancelled, Agon had to do London by itself. And also because the contract was still being attacked in court, there were extenuating circumstances. [...] We haven't set a [new] deadline as such but we have a Presidential Board meeting on 18 and 19 January in Armenia where it will probably be discussed and where Andrew Paulson is invited.

On top of that, Silvio Danailov, President of the Bulgarian Chess Federation, had only unkind remarks for Agon and its representative, Andrew Paulson:-

I have met Paulson & Co several times and I immediately realized that [they] are not serious and will be a complete disaster for chess after the Candidates where Azerbaijan pays the bill. So far this is their only sponsor. The London Grand Prix was one of the worse organized big chess events ever; everybody could see it. They have no money, no sponsors and absolutely no idea about chess at all.

A new angle for me was Danailov's assertion that there are other, unseen actors in the affair:-

Who is the real owner of Agon? Obviously Paulson is a simple employee which he confirmed during the CAS hearing. FIDE promised to disclose who is Agon's owner after the ratification of the contract and again silence and nothing happened. Why?

For more about the Bulgarian lawsuit, see European Chess Union NEWSLETTER 91 (17 September 2012). For more about 'one of the worst organized big chess events ever', see Silvio Danailov: "We don’t like being treated as fools!" (10 October 2012):-

I thought I had seen everything in the chess world, but…I have never seen such a way of running a tournament as that in London! I got the impression that nobody wanted this tournament at all. A bad playing hall, into which there was no entry, would you believe, constant noise from neighbouring areas (the restaurant was being refurbished), no demo boards or spectators in the playing room, and even in the press room there was nothing except a tiny monitor.

What most surprised me about all of this was the apathy of the Chessvibes readership. Where one would normally find dozens of informed comments, there was only one. What is going on here?

2012 Women's World Championship, Players

Finishing with my two previous posts, 2012 Women's World Championship and Knockout Format KOed?, I added the participants in the 2012 FIDE Knockout Matches to the Index of Women Players.

Three posts to finish one page?! I must be slipping.

2012-2013 Grand Prix, Tashkent

I added the crosstable and PGN for the 2012 Tashkent event to my page on the 2012-2013 Grand Prix. After the 2012 London event, this is the second of six events. According to the FIDE calendar, the third event will take place in Lisbon starting April 2013.

Media coverage for Tashkent was considerably more subdued than for London, perhaps because the organizer, Agon, has not yet hit full stride. The Candidates Matches for the current cycle, to be held in March 2013 in London, and the Lisbon leg of the next cycle's Grand Prix will show us what Agon is capable of doing.

Knockout Format KOed?

Finishing up with last week's post on the 2012 Women's World Championship, I added records of the individual matches to my page on the Women's 2012 FIDE Knockout Matches. The last task was to add an issue date to my link for the 'Regulations' for the event. I keep track of FIDE announcements on the World Championship, but for this event I had nothing.

I couldn't find an announcement on the FIDE site, but I did find something related on Chessvibes.com: Hou Yifan starts new Women GP with 4/4, dated August 2011. The search also led me to a page on YifanHou.net, titled Women's World Chess Championship 2012, a site/blog not administered by the former Women's World Champion, but by an admirer. The page starts,

The "new" FIDE Regulations for the Women’s World Chess Championship Cycle have caused some serious amazement among the insiders of the chess scene.

Later it gets heavier.

It has to be mentioned again and again that these regulations apply exclusively in women's chess. Ilyumzhinov seems to be too much a miserable coward to involve the men's championship since the resistance would blow him out of his presidency when Anand loses his first round match against one of the African stars.

This is close to what happened in the 2012 Women's Championship, when all of the top seeds were eliminated in the second round. More pages in the same style can be found using the search 'site:yifanhou.net inurl:uncensored'. It's good to know that some keen observers of the international chess scene are paying close attention to women's chess. Despite the deficiencies of the current format, congratulations are due to Anna Ushenina, the new Women's World Champion.

2012 Women's World Championship

I added the recently completed Women's World Championship, aka 2012 FIDE Knockout Matches, to my page on the World Chess Championship for Women. The page on the matches is only a stub, because I ran into a number of small technical problems and ran out of time. I'll complete it as soon as I can.