Zonal Qualifiers C15-C26 : Crosslinks

Returning to the table in Zonal Qualifiers C15-C26 : Summary, I linked all of the pages in the 'Zonals' column (aka clippings) to the corresponding page in the 'Qualifiers' column. I also linked each 'Qualifiers' page backed to the 'Zonals' page. As for individual pages, here are discrepancies I flagged in the blog post for each cycle.

• C15: Zones 4 & 8
• C16: Qualified by rating?
• C17: Why Gelfand over Salov?
• C18-C21: Incomplete data
• C22-C24: Ditto
• C25-C26: OK!

Before I tackle those points, I want to address a few more current aspects of the World Championship.

Zonal Qualifiers C15-C26 : Summary

Nearly five months ago, in my first post to document Interzonal++ qualifying paths, Zonal Qualifiers C25-C26, I wrote,

I'll continue backwards in time to see how this works for previous cycles. The new pages aren't yet linked from any other page. That will happen when I'm happy with the structure.

I've taken the project back to C15 and the following table shows the accumulated effort. For each of the twelve cycles, the columns link to the original page documenting the zonal events for the cycle ('Zonals'), the blog post where I released the results for one or more cycles ('Blog'), and the new page listing the qualifying paths for that cycle ('Qualifiers').

Cycle	Zonals	Blog	Qualifiers
C15	1990-93	C15	1990-93Q
C16	1993-96	C16	1993-96Q
C17	1995-97	C17	1995-97Q
C18	1998-99	C18-C21	1998-99Q
C19	2000-01	-"-	2000-01Q
C20	2001-02	-"-	2001-02Q
C21	2002-04	-"-	2002-04Q
C22	2004-05	C22-C24	2004-05Q
C23	2006-07	-"-	2006-07Q
C24	2008-09	-"-	2008-09Q
C25	2010-11	C25-C26	2010-11Q
C26	2012-13	-"-	2012-13Q

The next step will be to add crosslinks to the pages in m-w.com. Many of the links in the 'Blog' column flag follow-up actions that need to be addressed separately.

Zonal Qualifiers C15 - Qualification Paths

After completing the preliminary work described in my previous post, Regulations for Qualifiers C15, I tried to determine the qualification paths for each of the 64 players who competed in the 1990 Manila Interzonal. The two tables below show the counts of players who qualified by the different paths.

The left table ('Qual') counts the types of qualifiers as defined in the first part of Zonal Qualifiers 1990-1993 (C15). The right table ('Zonal') counts the players who qualified at a certain zonal ('z'), as listed in the second part of the same page.

At the same time I worked on the qualification paths, I added a few new clippings to Zonals 1990-1993 (C15). These are mainly explanations about players from specific zonals and I have a few more to add when I find the time.

The first row in the 'Qual' table counts eight players where I am not certain how they qualified. These are mainly players who were nominated by Continental Vice-Presidents (Qual = 'd').

Some of the counts in the 'Zonal' table are also likely to be wrong. Zone 4 (USSR) reportedly had six qualifiers from the zonal, but I can only identify five. Zone 8 (Central America) shows three qualifiers, but one of these might have been the nomination of the Continental Vice-President.

Whatever the real status of my tables and counts, they give a good basis for further investigation. Before I pursue that, I would like to incorporate the dozen new pages showing Qualification Paths into the rest of my material on the zonals.

Regulations for Qualifiers C15

After working on Zonal Qualifiers C16 - Qualification Paths, I turned my attention to the 1990 Manila Interzonal Tournament. I found an overview of the regulations to determine qualified players and started a new page, Zonal Qualifiers 1990-1993 (C15).

The list of players competing in the Interzonal, plus the regulations, plus the details on the Zonals 1990-1993 (C15), should allow me to identify how most of the players qualified for the 1990 Interzonal. I'll work on that for my next post.

Cold War Chess Politics

On the Streatham & Brixton blog, Justin Horton posted about

the impact of the building of the Berlin Wall [1961] on various international chess tournaments that were due to take place that year and the next: mainly the Women's Olympiad, which was cancelled, but also making reference to the Interzonal, which took place not in Amsterdam, as planned, in 1961, but in Stockholm the next year. • Past imperfect III

A related clipping from the August 1961 BCM mentioned three forthcoming international events scheduled for the Netherlands:-

• 1961-08: World Junior, The Hague;
• 1961-09: Women's Olympics, Emmen; and
• 1962-01: Interzonal, Amsterdam [BCM said 1961-01, but this looks like a misprint].

To this list he added an event from my page on the zonals of that period, C05: 1960-1963, specifically,

• 1960-11: Zone 2 - Berg en Dal zonal,

where he questioned a statement from Robert Wade:-

Uhlmann of East Germany was refused a visa. This was one of the tit-for-tats in which NATO countries have retaliated for the setting up of the Berlin wall by refusing visas for all East Germans.

Wade apparently confused the years-long Berlin crisis with the building of the wall, the central event of that crisis. Here is a chronology from William Langer's Encyclopedia of World History (p.1200), a work I use frequently for understanding the connections between world events.

The Berg en Dal, Ubbergen [Wikipedia], tournament, which took place in November 1960, was also mentioned in a BCM clipping on my 'C05: 1960-1963' page:-

The East German grandmaster, W. Uhlmann, was refused an entry visa by the Dutch authorities, who said that multi-lateral agreements prevented them from granting it until he had obtained the necessary documents from the Allied Control Commission in West Berlin.

To understand the connection between the September 1960 events and the Allied Control Commission would take me into details of post-WWII cold war tensions that go beyond the objectives of this chess blog. In Bobby Fischer: Profile of a Prodigy, Frank Brady mentioned the impact of the Berlin events on the 1962 Stockholm Interzonal:-

The long, slow-burning, potentially eruptive conflict [the Berlin crisis] was no doubt partially responsible for the fact that FIDE was having no luck in its attempts to find a site for the Interzonal tournament. (p.48)

Since this would be more directly relevant to chess history, I'll see what I can discover for a future post. Thanks, Justin, for highlighting the entire sequence of events.

Zonal Qualifiers C16 - Qualification Paths

I ended my previous post, Regulations for Qualifiers C16, saying, 'There are still some blanks to be filled, so I'll continue this exercise for my next post.' I returned to the two pages

• Zonals 1993-1996 (C16) and
• Zonal Qualifiers 1993-1996 (C16),

filled in the blanks, double-checked some assumptions, corrected a few errors, and added the list 'Player - How qualified' to the 'Zonal Qualifiers' page.

The table on the left is similar to the one shown in Zonal Qualifiers C17 - Qualification Paths. It counts and summarizes the qualification paths of the 74 players who competed in the 1993 Biel FIDE Interzonal.

The letters in the left column correspond to the paragraphs from the first section of the 'Zonal Qualifiers' page ('Comment ils se sont qualifiés' = 'How they qualified'). For example, 'a' counts the players who qualified on rating, 'e' counts players who qualified as ex-World Champions (only Smyslov accepted), and 'z' counts players who qualified via a zonal.

The counts total to 76, so where do the two extra players come from? Europe Echecs listed ten players qualified on rating ('a'), but only eight eventually played (Azmaiparashvili and Christiansen were missing). On top of that, I identified another six players who didn't qualify by any obvious path. Since they all had ratings in the same range, I assumed they also qualified on rating and assigned them code 'a?' to keep them separate.

For my next post, I'll tackle qualification paths for the preceding cycle, Zonals 1990-1993 (C15).

Regulations for Qualifiers C16

After Zonal Qualifiers C17 - Qualification Paths, and continuing to work backwards in time, I tackled the preceding cycle, C16. First I located a list of players who qualified for the interzonal and added the clippings to Zonals 1993-1996 (C16). The same source, Europe Echecs, had an overview of the regulations in force at the time. I used this to start a new page Zonal Qualifiers 1993-1996 (C16).

Combining this information with the players who finally participated in the 1993 Biel FIDE Interzonal Tournament, let me work out how most of the players qualified. There are still some blanks to be filled, so I'll continue this exercise for my next post.