C30 Zonal Qualification Paths

After last week's post, C30 More Zonal Clippings (February 2022), I had one more action to accomplish : expand the page C30 Zonal Qualifiers 2020-2021 (m-w.com) from a stub to a full list of qualifying players. The data was adapted from links announced in Players lists and full pairings of FIDE World Cups published (fide.com).

The record of the corresponding event, 2021 World Cup; Sochi (Russia), VII-VIII, 2021, reveals many discrepancies between players who qualified and players who participated. There were at least two reasons for this:-

• Complications from the coronavirus covid-19 pandemic.
• Enlargement of the event to include 90+ players nominated by national federations.

While documenting the previous cycle, C29 Zonal Qualification Paths (December 2019), I developed a chart comparing 'Qualified, but didn't play' vs. 'Played, but not on list of qualified players'. I'll do the same for C30.

C30 More Zonal Clippings

A few weeks ago, in C30 Zonal Clippings (January 2022), I created a couple of stub pages to document the zonals for the current cycle. I ended the post saying,

The next step, of course, will be to flesh out the two stubs. I hope to tackle both at the same time.

Of course, of course, that was too ambitious. The clippings that I added to the primary page, Zonals 2020-2021, (C30; m-w.com), documented several events that had more complicated structures than zonals in past cycles. These were multi-stage hybrid events held online to decide qualifying players from continental federations. Will this online trend continue into the next cycle (C31)? We'll find out next year.

Worth mentioning is a blow-by-blow account by the Chessexpress blog of the event for zone 3.6. We first saw this blog two years ago in C29 Zonal Qualification Paths (December 2019). Here are the relevant posts:-

• 2021-03-04: 2021 Oceania Zonal • 'The 2021 Oceania Zonal is now going ahead as a "hybrid" event. This means that the players will be playing online, but supervised by an in place arbiter.'
• 2021-03-21: 2021 Oceania Zonal - Day 1
• 2021-03-22: On hybrid chess
• 2021-03-27: 2021 Oceania Zonal - Day 3
• 2021-03-28: Oceania Zonal - Final Day

Next step: tackle the page Zonal Qualifiers 2020-2021 (C30; m-w.com). Given the increase in the number of players, this also promises to be more complicated then previous pages of the same type.

2022 Grand Prix & Candidates

I updated my WCC site with the latest info related to the two final World Championship qualifying events:-

• 2022 Grand Prix; Berlin, II-IV, 2022 (m-w.com)
• 2022 Candidates Tournament; Madrid, VI-VII, 2022 (ditto)

The Grand Prix starts in a few days and the Candidates Tournament, announced in December 2021, is a new page. The Grand Prix will qualify two players into the Candidates, which will decide the challenger for the next title match.

When I say, 'the Grand Prix starts in a few days', I'm not completely certain. On Monday, 31 January, FIDE annnounced, 'FIDE Grand Prix Series 2022 starts in Berlin on February 3', i.e. Thursday this week. A day later, on Tuesday, 1 February, the world federation announced, 'FIDE Grand Prix 2022: Ding and Andreikin replaced by Esipenko and Wojtaszek.' (See my 'Grand Prix' page for links to both annnouncements.)

Both Ding Liren and Dmitry Andreikin were on the list of players starting this week. Does FIDE's left hand not know what the right hand is doing? Did the federation not contact the players one last time before making the announcement?

Both of this week's annnouncements used the comic-style illustration shown below. On top of reminding me about those weird logos created for the 2018 World Championship, London (December 2017), I asked myself, 'What are those structures on the right side of the drawing?' The only explanation I could think of, besides Niagara Falls, was that they represent the Berlin Wall. That's OK if we're talking about chess; it's not OK if we're talking about Berlin as a 20th century political symbol.

There was one more surprise on the Monday announcement. Belgrade was listed as the venue for the second of the three Grand Prix events, where previously Berlin had been the announced venue for all three.

For the Candidates Tournament, there was also a surprise announcement: 'Candidates play-off introduced':-

The play-off will consist of rapid games. Details like the exact time control to be used and the total number of players to take part in the tie-break, will be decided in January after further consultation with players.

This would have been an issue for the 2013 Candidates Tournament, London (m-w.com), where Carlsen tied with Kramnik for first. As I documented on that page,

Carlsen was declared the winner based on 'b) The total number of wins'

Given Carlsen's expressed desire to cherry-pick his challenger -- see 2021 Carlsen - Nepomniachtchi, Wrapup (December 2021) for details -- a play-off match would allow the challengers to nudge Carlsen out of the title match. Has everyone thought these things through?

C30 Zonal Clippings

After last week's post C30 Zonals Indexed (January 2022), the next step was to follow the lead established during the previous cycle, C29 Zonal Clippings (November 2019). First I created two new pages:-

• Zonals 2020-2021 (C30)
• Zonal Qualifiers 2020-2021 (C30)

Both pages are stubs. The first page, 'Zonals 2020-2021', only has crosstables for two events that took place before 2021. The corresponding 'Qualifiers' page is currently marked 'TBD'. After creating those pages, I plugged them into two index pages:-

• World Chess Championship
• World Chess Championship Zonals

The next step, of course, will be to flesh out the two stubs. I hope to tackle both at the same time.

C30 Zonals Indexed

After identifying qualification events in C30 Zonals (January 2022), I added the required data to the index of World Chess Championship Zonals. In a similar exercise for the previous cycle, C29 Zonals Indexed (November 2019), I noted, 'The 28 new events make a total of 469 events recorded on the index.' The same calculation this time yields:-

The 18 new events make a total of 487 events recorded on the index.

The drop in the number of new events from 28 to 18 is, of course, a result of the covid pandemic which has swept the world during the last two years. The following chart shows the evolution in the number of events during the last five cycles, where each cycle took two years to complete.

C26: 2012-13, ... C30: 2020-21

The left column is the continent number -- '1' (= Europe), etc. -- where I use '0' for events not tied to a specific continent. In this chart, the count for continent '0' means the ACP Tour. It was undoubtedly suspended because of the pandemic, although I could find nothing official on the ACP's site Chessprofessionals.org.

All continents showed a drop in the number of events from C29 to C30. The drop for '2' (= Americas) was likely even more severe than the numbers show, because the C30 count includes three zones for which I could find almost no info. I'll look more closely into those for a future post.

At one point last year I wasn't sure if the cycle would go forward. I documented this in a pair of posts:-

• 2021-03-31: A New Cycle Is Struggling to Survive
• 2021-06-02: A New Cycle Is Coping Nicely

That second post mentions Tornelo, which I documented in another post on my main blog:-

• 2021-06-13: The Tornelo Online Platform

Tornelo was used in eight of the 15 events that I know took place (18 - 3). Three more events were played using other online platforms, meaning that just four events were played in a traditional face-to-face venue.

C30 Zonals

Continuing with C30 Regulations for World Cup Qualifiers (October 2021), where I referenced 'Players lists and full pairings of FIDE World Cups published' (fide.com; June 2021), the following table uses the same format as the equivalent post for the previous cycle. C29 Zonals (September 2019). For each event, it references the corresponding number of 'The Week in Chess' (TWIC).

For many events, the FIDE document mentioned above, 'Players lists', references a page for the event in Chess-results.com. It turns out that these are only a subset of the events documented in TWIC.

1.0: TWIC 1386 (2021)
1.10: TWIC 1381

2.0: TWIC 1386 (2021)
2.1: TWIC 1356
2.2: TWIC 1387
2.3: (02)
2.4: (03)
2.5: (04)

3.0: TWIC 1386 (2021)
3.0i: TWIC 1386 (01, AICF)
3.1: TWIC 1387
3.2: TWIC 1388
3.3: TWIC 1383
3.4: TWIC 1384
3.5: TWIC 1387
3.6: TWIC 1377
3.7: TWIC 1311

4.0: TWIC 1386

(2021)
In previous cycles continental championships were organized for both years of the cycle, with players qualifying from both events. In the current cycle, only a single event was held for each continent.

(01)
TWIC: 'AICF World Cup Qualifier 2021'; FIDE: 'Asian Continental - Indian Qual', 'India Asian quota qualifier'

(02)
See GM Albornoz, Cuba y Barrientos, Colombia na Copa do Mundo (fideamerica.org), which implies that the representatives from the zone were chosen by the zone president.

(03,04)
Same as '(02)'?

In the 'C30 Regulations' post, I wrote,

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.

While I didn't see any traps, I did notice that the various events were not covered by the chess press as well as they were in previous cycles. The blame still falls on covid-19.

2021 Grand Swiss PGN and Player Indices

As planned in two recent posts -- 2021 Grand Swiss Crosstables (November 2021), and 2021 Carlsen - Nepomniachtchi, Crosstable & PGN (December 2021) -- I finally finished related updates for the three events.

For the two Grand Swiss events, I added the PGN and updated both indices of players, unrestricted events and women's events. The links for all updated resources are in the 'Crosstables' post. At the same time I updated the index of players for the Carlsen - Nepo match.

Of 108 players in the unrestricted Grand Swiss, 17 were new to the index (although two still require an additional verification step). Of the 50 players in the Women's Grand Swiss, eight were new to the women's index.

The second half of 2021 was a busy period for the World Championship, with two cycles in full swing. FIDE has announced some plans for 2022, which will be the subject of a future post.