Rusbase Zonals

My post Events Covered by Rusbase mentioned that the database included seven zonal tournaments. I checked these against my own index of zonal events -- World Chess Championship Zonals (version: 'Last updated 2007-09-14') -- and discovered the following:-

• Moscow 1964 [?]
  
• Vilnius 1975 [174]
  
• Lvov 1978 [163]
  
• Erevan 1982 [154]
  
• Lvov 1990 [108; playoff : 337]
  
• St Petersburg 1993 [95; z1.6]
  
• Protvino 1993 [92; z1.5b; what about Kladovo z1.5?, Zouberi z1.5a, and 2 x z1.7]

Links are to the Rusbase page for the event. Numbers in brackets ('[nn]') are the internal numeric ID used in my database of zonals. • Two events need further investigation: Moscow 1964 and zones related to Protvino 1993.

17th World Computer Championship

I added the 17th World Computer Championship (WCCC) - 2009 Pamplona to my page on Computer Chess. The official results are linked via a page at ICGA Tournaments (www.grappa.univ-lille3.fr).

2009 World Cup Qualifiers

The 2009 World Cup is scheduled to start in a little more than six months, meaning that the chess calendar is crammed with zonals and continental championships over the next few months. The FIDE Calendar 2009 (which also has an archive for previous years) lists the main event finishing before it starts.

• Name Place Start End
  
• World Cup 2009 Khanty- Mansiysk, Russia 20-Dec-2009 15-Dec-2009

This calls into question the accuracy of the rest of the calendar (the first date should be 20-Nov, of course). With that in mind, here are the events that have been scheduled.

Europe

• European Individual Chess Championship 2009 Budva, Montenegro 5-Mar-2009 19-Mar-2009
  
• European Individual Women's Chess Championship 2009 St. Petersburg, Russia 7-Mar-2009 21-Mar-2009

Americas

• US Chess Championship 2009 Saint Louis, USA 7-May-2009 17-May-2009
  
• Zonal 2.4 Absolute and Women Río de Janeiro, Brazil 8-Jun-2009 18-Jun-2009
  
• Zonal 2.5 Absolute and Women Asuncion, Paraguay 15-Jun-2009
  
• Continental Absolute Championship 12-Jul-2009 25-Jul-2009

Asia

• Zone 3.2 Zonal, Open and Women India
  
• Zone 3.5 Zonal, Open and Women China
  
• Zone 3.4 Zonal, Open and Women Tashkent, Uzbekistan 16-Jun-2009 27-Jun-2009
  
• Zone 3.6 Oceania Zonal Championships 2009 Gold Coast, Australia 20-Jun-2009 26-Jun-2009
  
• Zone 3.1 Zonal, Open and Women Sanaa, Yemen 23-Jun-2009 29-Jun-2009
  
• Zone 3.3 Zonal, Open and Women Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam 22-Jul-2009 30-Jul-2009
  
• Asian Continental Championship (M & W) Subic Freeport, Philippines 12-May-2009 23-May-2009

There is nothing yet on the calendar for Africa.

***

It hasn't received a great deal of comment from the players who are affected, but there is a serious problem with the results of the European Championships, held in March. Chessdom.com (see TCF vs. ECU Case) and Chessbase.com (see Yazici: 'Law is just and justice prevails') reported at the end of April that a Lausanne court (Tribunal d'Arrondissement de Lausanne) had ruled in favor of the Turkish Chess Federation (TCF) in a dispute with the European Chess Union (ECU).

A link on Chessdom leads to OPEN LETTER : TO ALL CHESS FEDERATIONS AND MEDIA (26 April 2009), where Ali Nihat Yazici, President of the Turkish Federation, explains,

What are the probable consequences?

1. With the court decision regarding the European Individual Chess Championship, the European Individual Championships held in Montenegro and Russia for men and women respectively are both void. Any of the players that participated and qualified from those events cannot play in the World Cup (that is the opinion after consulting lawyers). Those tournaments should be held in 2009 again! ECU is responsible for all the expenses of those events spent by players and organizers. FIDE, as the body controlling the World Championship cycle, should convene quickly and decide about it. It is an absolute mess now.

Is this political posturing by the Turkish Federation or a personal dispute between chess officials who are using players as human shields?

2008-2009 Grand Prix, Nalchik

I added the crosstable and PGN for the fourth Grand Prix event at Nalchik to my page on the 2008-2009 Grand Prix.

In my previous post on the Grand Prix (see 2008-2009 Grand Prix, Elista), I mentioned that the official site (grandprix.fide.com) was badly out of date. It looks better now and the results from Nalchik have already been added to the overall standings. Navara is still listed as active, unlike Al-Modiahki and Pelletier, who are listed as 'excluded'. The status of the three players went into limbo when their sponsors, the organizers for three different Grand Prix events, withdrew.

According to Kirsan Ilyumzhinov at Elista FIDE Grand Prix (15 December 2008; Fide.com), 'the fifth tournament will be held in August 2009 in the capital of Armenia, Yerevan'. The venue for the sixth and last event is unknown.

Anand on Chess

The last time I featured interviews in a post was on the 2010 Candidates at the beginning of the year. Since then there have been many good interviews worth documenting, but the series on World Champion Anand that ran on Chessbase.com from February to April was exceptionally good. Here are links with excerpts that I particularly liked. • Location: Chennai; Date: 26th December 2008; Interviewers: Sriram Srinivasan and Jaideep Unudurti.

• From square one to the World Championship in Bonn • Q: How would an ideal chess economy look like? A: I think in general it’s a fairly good system. We have tournaments at every level. I think once you make your mark, some way or the other, either you become the best player of your country or you become one of the best in the world. In the case of Russia you could be number eight in Russia and could still have some work to do before you’d be the first choice. I think the system as it is now, as long as it stable, we are back to the system of having only one world championship; that is very good for the game. And now lots of new countries are turning up. There is a Norwegian, Magnus Carlsen, who is fourth in the world, there is an Italian, there is an Armenian, there is a Ukrainian. So already the top ten is looking very diverse and nice. Which is a very interesting face to present to the world. So I think the system is healthy. Now if we keep the stability of the world championship and grow it from here it will be very healthy.
  
  
• Chess as a profession and on computers • Q: When was the first time you started using a computer in your chess preparation? A: 1988. It was a computer I had here at home. At the end of 1988 I bought a laptop. [...] I would say I was there right in the very beginning. The first database appeared in 1986 but even then it wasn’t really useful. Maybe Kasparov beat me by a few months. He was world champion already so he might have beaten me by a few months to it. But I was there at the very beginning. So I have used computers from the time they appeared in chess.
  
  
• On intuition, creativity and blitz chess • Q: Botvinnik became the champion in 1948. You beat Kramnik, a student of his in 2008. There is no other comparable Russian star. Is the Russian era over? A: Far from it. I think they are going through a brief rough patch. But still by many measures they are the leading chess country on earth. That’s not bad, given they had so many bad years recently. I think simply the rest of the world is catching up. If you compare any single country with Russia they are still ahead on everything.
  
  
• On the World Championship in Bonn • Q: The biggest bombshell in the [Kramnik] match was you playing 1.d4. You have been a life-long e4 player. Switching to d4, they say that it requires a certain “feel” for the positions, an intuitive understanding. You don’t have that much experience in playing d4, so did you worry about that? A: It was a problem and I went into it with quite some trepidation. You have a feeling that you may make a complete fool of yourself. Every game you will play, you’ll play your preparation and then in the middle-game because of unfamiliarity with certain structures you will make errors of judgement. That fear was in the back of my head. Last November I decided to play d4 and not to revisit this decision. I’m going to play it, I decided, and told my team now you can start working on d4, this is the stuff you have to cover and I’m not going to second-guess it. It is very easy to start second-guessing and there can be no way to finish this discussion. I’m happy I stuck with it; it went much better than I hoped for. I had no difficulties, but somewhere in the back of my head I did have this worry.

Fischer once said of Euwe, 'There’s something wrong with that man. He’s too normal.' He could also have been talking about Anand.

Privacy Policy

In response to this message received from Google...

Subject: Introducing interest-based advertising - action required for your AdSense account
Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2009 00:32:36 -0400 (EDT)

We're writing to let you know about the upcoming launch of interest-based advertising, which will require you to review and make any necessary changes to your site's privacy policies. You'll also see some new options on your Account Settings page.

Interest-based advertising will allow advertisers to show ads based on a user's previous interactions with them, such as visits to advertiser website and also to reach users based on their interests (e.g. "sports enthusiast"). To develop interest categories, we will recognize the types of web pages users visit throughout the Google content network. As an example, if they visit a number of sports pages, we will add them to the "sports enthusiast" interest category. To learn more about your associated account settings, please visit the AdSense Help Center at http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=20310.

As a result of this announcement, your privacy policy will now need to reflect the use of interest-based advertising. Please review the information at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=100557 to ensure that your site's privacy policies are up-to-date, and make any necessary changes by April 8, 2009. Because publisher sites and laws vary across countries, we're unfortunately unable to suggest specific privacy policy language.

For more information about interest-based advertising, you can also visit the Inside AdSense Blog at http://adsense.blogspot.com/2009/03/driving-monetization-with-ads-that.html.

We appreciate your participation and look forward to this upcoming enhancement.

Sincerely,
The Google AdSense Team

Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your AdSense product or account.

Google Inc.; 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway; Mountain View, CA 94043

...I updated the 'Privacy statement' on the World Chess Championship Site Map. The pages mentioned in the Google message are:-

• Interest-based advertising,
  
• Google Advertising Cookie and Privacy Policies, and
  
• Driving monetization with ads that reach the right audience.

Other links of interest might be

• Results for "writing to let you know about the upcoming launch of interest-based advertising", and
  
  
• Advertising and Privacy, which has the opt-out function for individual users.

Google already knows a lot about Web users and this Adsense change will add to their knowledge.

Asian Zonals (1952-1990)

I found my summary of African Zonals so useful (see Chess in Africa - African Zonals) that I prepared a similar summary for Asia. Since there have been far more events played in Asia, I tackled it in pieces. The following table shows events played before the introduction of continental numbering when Asia was split into zones 3.1, 3.2, etc.

There are several open questions with the earliest events -- cycles 2, 3, and 5 -- and with the event in zone 9, cycle 11. For an overview of all zonal events, see
Zonal Overview.