2022 Grand Prix, 2nd Leg (Belgrade)

Two weeks after adding 2022 Grand Prix, 1st Leg (March 2022) to my page on the 2022 Grand Prix; Berlin / Belgrade (m-w.com), I incorporated the second leg on the same page. Following is a summary of TWIC introductions ('by Mark Crowther') from the weeks when the event took place:-

• TWIC1425, 2022-02-28 • 'The second FIDE Grand Prix starts tomorrow in Belgrade, I have no idea what to expect.'
• TWIC1426, 2022-03-07 • 'The FIDE Grand Prix in Belgrade has a day off tomorrow as the group stages all proved decisive. Dmitry Andreikin, Anish Giri, Richard Rapport and MVL [Maxime Vachier-Lagrave] all topped their group without the need for a tie-break.'
• TWIC1427, 2022-03-14 • 'Richard Rapport has one foot in the Candidates tournament after his win in the second FIDE Grand Prix in Belgrade. The third and final one takes place in Berlin starting next Monday.'

The sentence in the first TWIC report, 'I have no idea what to expect', referred to the Russian attack on Ukraine that started a few days before the Belgrade event opened. Of the five Russian players, only GM Andreikin advanced from the preliminary stage to the playoff stage. He lost in the final match to GM Rapport of Hungary. There were no Ukrainian players.

The official site for the event FIDE Grand Prix 2022 Series (worldchess.com) offers a 'Fleece Hoodie', shown in the following image ('Time to say Berlin'). I can't figure out what the design means. A man dressed in white is fighting a black ghost over spaghetti, while stepping in something that can't be good. Hmmm.

C30 Zonal Rating Reports

After C30 Zonal Qualification Paths (February 2022), the next step would be a post like C29 Zonal Rating Reports (March 2020), to identify the different events on Fide.com (more specifically ratings.fide.com). When I started to do this, using C30 Zonals 2020-2021 (m-w.com) as a guide, I encountered a problem -- most of the events had no rating reports.

As I write this post, I don't know if they are missing because the events weren't rated -or- because they are documented elsewhere -or- because I made a mistake. I didn't have time to investigate more thoroughly. In the meantime, I located the same events on Chess-results.com:-

• 1.0 2021-05-29: European Hybrid Qualification
• 1.10 2021-04-25: European Small Nations Hybrid
• 2.0 2021-05-29: American World Cup Qualification Stage - FIDE World Cup 2021 Knock Out - Registrations (links to three stages)
• 2.1 Chess-results.com?
• 2.2 2021-06-03: Online Canadian Qualifier
• 3.0 2021-05-29: Asian Individual Hybrid Chess
• 3.0i 2021-05-30: AICF World Cup Qualifier
• 3.1 2021-06-07: Zone 3.1 Chess Championships 2021
• 3.2 2021-06-09: SAIF Powertec Asian Zonal 3.2 Chess Championship 2021
• 3.3 2021-05-09: Zone 3.3 Zonal Chess Championships 2021
• 3.4 2021-05-15: Zone 3.4 Zonal Open Championship 2021
• 3.5 2021-05-31: Zone 3.5 Zonal Open Championship 2021
• 3.6 Chess-results.com?
• 3.7 2019-12-19: National Senior Chess Championship - 2019
• 4.0 2021-05-27: 2021 African Individual Chess Championships - Open Section

I'll look at this once more before I update the page Zonals : Links and Other References; Last updated 2020-03-11 (m-w.com; 'Reports from ratings.fide.com'). Note that two events are also missing on Chess-results.com. Something is wrong here.

2022 Grand Prix, 1st Leg (Berlin)

In last week's post, 2022 Grand Prix Regulations (cont.) (February 2022), I wrote,

I added more detailed explanation to my page and will continue with the crosstables as soon as I can.

'My page' is 2022 Grand Prix, Berlin/Belgrade. It now has both crosstables and PGN for the first leg, which took place in in Berlin.

The second leg, in Belgrade, started this week. With war raging in nearby Ukraine, the organizers announced a new logo.

World Chess Changes Logo to Anti-War Version
(worldchess.com)

I'll add the Belgrade leg to my page after the results are known.

2022 Grand Prix Regulations (cont.)

A few weeks after the previous post on forthcoming events for the current cycle, 2022 Grand Prix & Candidates (February 2022), the first tournament of the Grand Prix finished. As I gathered the PGN and prepared the corresponding crosstables, I realized that the structure of the event was even more complicated than I had previously understood.

To help with this, I added more detailed explanation to my page 2022 Grand Prix; Berlin, II-IV (m-w.com), and will continue with the crosstables as soon as I can. The second tournament of the Grand Prix will take place in Belgrade. [NB: The venue on that page for the series of three tournaments should read 'Berlin and Belgrade'.]

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?