2019 World Cup Players

Following up last week's post on the 2019 World Cup Results, I added the PGN to my page 2019 World Cup, Khanty-Mansiysk. I also added the participants to my page World Chess Championship : Index of players. Of the 128 players who competed, 38 were new names on that index.

It seems that the regulations for the 2019 World Cup were considerably changed from the regulations for the 2017 World Cup, probably due to the change of FIDE management a year ago. I have to spend some time reviewing the changes before I can add a legend to the 2019 page, like I did for the 2017 World Cup, Tbilisi, and for all preceding World Cup pages. I'll do that as soon as I can.

2019 World Cup Results

I added the crosstable for the recent 2019 World Cup, played at Khanty-Mansiysk (Russia). This was the fifth time the event was held at that location.

For my next post, I'll add the PGN and update the Index of players. In related news, the 2019 Grand Swiss, a new addition to the qualifying events for next year's Candidates tournament is just getting underway.

Status of the Women's World Championship

For this post I intended to add a new page for the 2019-20 Women's Grand Prix, because the first event, held in Skolkovo (Russia), finished a few weeks ago. When I reviewed the previous post on the Women's Championship, Future of the Women's World Championship (June 2019), I found a question: 'Where is the follow-through describing the next cycle?' Since I still can't answer that question, I decided to abandon the new page for now. On top of FIDE's obsolete documentation, the recent design change of FIDE's web site has rendered many (all?) bookmarks unusable ('404 Page Not Found; The page you were looking for doesn't exist'), making any research problematic.

It's been a little more than 20 years since I started documenting the Women's World Championship. The first occurrence of the page in my archive is dated September 1999, and the first occurrence on Archive.org is dated March 2000. That first page looked like the following screen capture, with only title matches having crosstables.

archive.org/web/*/https://www.m-w.com/chess/wcc-womn.htm

As far as I could tell, that overview had never been done before and, like a jigsaw puzzle, it took some time to piece the record together from different clues. I determined the events under the columns for 'Interzonal' and 'Candidates' by starting with relevant PGN files, looking for games by Women's World Champions. Sometimes the only clue was 'IZ' or 'CT' in the PGN '[Event]' tag. When I found a game, I used the name of the other player to look for more games. Eventually I developed the overall picture. It was partly a hit-or-miss effort, and that March 2000 snapshot is missing a second Interzonal for both the 1976-78 and 1979-81 cycles.

After producing that first draft shown above, I spent the next year or so documenting the various events. It took me over a year to discover that I had overlooked the 1976 Roosendaal Interzonal. After once spending so much time guessing about historical events, I don't want to start guessing about future events. I'll wait until FIDE has published the necessary documents before I tackle the new cycle.

C29 Zonals

The previous post, C29 Regulations for World Cup Qualifiers, gave a summary of the different qualification paths for the 2019 World Cup currently taking place at Khanty-Mansiysk (Russia). Using that as a starting point, I identified 28 events that served as World Cup qualifiers.

For most events, the following table gives a reference from 'The Week in Chess' (TWIC). Where I could find no TWIC reference, I located a page giving results for the event.

0.0: (01, ACP)
1.0: TWIC 1222 (2018)
1.0: TWIC 1274 (2019)
1.0s: TWIC 1224 (European small nations; ESNA)
1.3: TWIC 1286 (Nordic Championship)
1.7: (02, Baltics)

2.0: TWIC 1232 (2018)
2.0: TWIC 1288 (2019)
2.1: TWIC 1273
2.2: TWIC 1277
2.3: (03)
2.4: TWIC 1276
2.5: TWIC 1276

3.0: TWIC 1259 (2018)
3.0: TWIC 1285 (2019)
3.1: TWIC 1286
3.1e: TWIC 1257 (Emirates Arab Championship)
3.2: TWIC 1272
3.3: TWIC 1275
3.4: TWIC 1282
3.5: TWIC 1241
3.6: TWIC 1268
3.7: TWIC 1259

4.0: TWIC 1289
4.1: TWIC 1278
4.2: TWIC 1279
4.3: TWIC 1278
4.4: TWIC 1278

(01)
Tour 2018. Standings (chessprofessionals.org; ACP)

(02)
TWIC 1228 : Baltic Zonal I Stage 2018
TWIC 1233 : Baltic Zonal II Stage 2018
TWIC 1236 : Baltic Zonal III Stage 2018

(03)
TORNEO ZONAL 2.3 EL SALVADOR 2019 "SSESTUYO" (chess-results.com)

The 'zonals' numbered 1.0s, 1.3, 1.7, and 3.1e were competitions to determine 'Nominees of the FIDE President'.

C29 Regulations for World Cup Qualifiers

The 2019 World Cup is currently taking place in Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia. While I'm waiting for it to finish is a good time to start documenting the qualifying events. I'll follow the same procedure as in the previous cycle, starting with:-

• 2017-09-13: C28 Regulations for World Cup Qualifiers

The list of qualifiers for the current cycle was published over the summer in World Cup 2019 Qualifiers and Contract (fide.com). Using the details in the related PDF document, I developed the chart shown below. The left side of the chart shows qualifying paths which were not taken from a standalone tournament, plus a count of players who qualified via each path. The right side shows a count of the players who qualified via direct competition, either a continental championship or a zonal.

My procedure for the previous cycle continued with the following steps:-

• 2017-09-20: C28 Zonals • 'I identified 27 events that served as World Cup qualifiers.'
• 2017-09-27: C28 Zonals Indexed • 'Continuing with C28 Zonals, I added the 27 events identified in that post to my [index] page on the World Chess Championship Zonals.'
• 2017-10-18: C28 Zonal Clippings 2016
• 2017-10-25: C28 Zonal Clippings TWIC
• 2017-11-01: C28 Other Zonal Clippings
• 2017-11-08: C28 Zonal Qualification Paths
• 2018-02-07: C28 Zonal Rating Reports
• 2018-02-14: C28 Zonal Links

In hindsight, I can't believe it took so many steps to document the zonals++, but so it seems.

Zonal Qualifiers C01-C12 Wrapup

Continuing with last week's Zonal Qualifiers C01-C12 More++, I added the following to the relevant pages:-

• Links from the various clipping pages to the corresponding qualifiers.
• Links from the qualifiers to the corresponding interzonals.
• Links to various explanatory pages.

Thus ends the small project I started with Zonal Qualifiers C01-C16 (May 2019). There is more I can do with these pages -- much more -- but it's time to tackle something else. The 2019 World Cup at Khanty-Mansiysk started this week and the qualifying paths for the current cycle (C29) need to be addressed.

Zonal Qualifiers C01-C12 More++

Continuing with last month's Zonal Qualifiers C01-C12, the original data used to create the C01-C12 pages had additional details about the qualifying events in the twelve cycles. I added these details to the C01-C12 pages.

Some details are superficial; others require further research; all are appropriate to understanding a specific cycle. For pointers to all twelve pages, see the 'QP' links on the index of World Chess Championship Zonals.