I added the crosstable and PGN for the second event in the
2019 Grand Prix.
The tournament's logo is shown to the left. For the blog post on the first event, see
2019 Grand Prix, Moscow.
Three of the 15 matches played at Riga were decided by Armageddon games. Compare that to the Moscow event, where only one match went beyond the rapidplay tiebreak and was decided in the first blitz match.
I've decided that the format of the data in the chart is sufficient for new zonal pages on my World Championship site.
I applied the format to four cycles and created four new pages:-
These pages show only the qualifier data. The other bells and whistles found on the existing pages, like (C13) 1984-1987 Zonal Cycle Qualifiers, will be added after I create similar pages for C01 through C08.
The first two columns are from the ZQP (zonal qualifying paths) data that I described in the C12 post. The last two columns are from my own pages. The zone numbers 'z01' etc. correspond to my page (C11) 1978-1981 Zonal Cycle. The last column is a code for the two interzonals that were held during the cycle:-
There are two gaps in the data. One is for Mecking; the other is for Sunye Neto. I'll follow those up another time.
I've decided that the format of the data in the chart is sufficient for new zonal pages on my World Championship site. See the table at the bottom of the index page, World Chess Championship Zonals, for cycles C13 (1984-87) and after.
The information about the next cycle is scattered across different documents and, although it's consistent, I couldn't find a single document pulling everything together. [...] There might be a basic document that I've overlooked.
The most important document for understanding FIDE's current direction is the FIDE Handbook. Here's a copy of the World Championship section where I've highlighted the women's events in red.
There are four parts:-
07. Regulations for the Women's World Chess Championship Cycle
08. Regulations for the FIDE Women’s World Championship Match 2019-20
09. Regulations for the 2019-2020 Women's FIDE Grand Prix
10. Rules for the FIDE Women's Candidates Tournament 2019
The first part should cover the entire cycle, but it describes the former system of a knockout championship alternating with a match.
07. Regulations for the Women's World Chess Championship Cycle
1.1. The Women’s World Chess Championship shall be organised annually and qualifying events include the following: National Championships, Zonal Tournaments, Continental Championships, FIDE Women’s Grand Prix and the final stages, the Women’s World Chess Championship Tournament in even years 2018, 2020 etc. (64-player knock out system) and the Women’s World Chess Championship Match (10 games, 2 players) in odd years 2017, 2019, etc.
2. Qualifying events for the Women’s World Chess Championship Tournament (knock out system)...
The other documents describe a future cycle. For example:-
09. Regulations for the 2019-2020 Women's FIDE Grand Prix
2.8. The two players who score the most number of cumulative points in WGP Series qualify to the FIDE Women Candidates Tournament to be held in the first half of 2021.
The next Women's World Cup is scheduled for Minsk, Belarus, starting September 2020. How many players will qualify for the 2021 Candidates Tournament? My guess is two, along with the loser of the forthcoming title match, a couple of seeds based on rating, and an organizer's choice.
The announcement of the women's candidates tournament changed a cycle which was already in progress, a rookie mistake. Where is the follow-through describing the next cycle? Note that the the women's events are not the only problem in the handbook, which currently describes two candidates tournaments in the main WCC cycle.
05. Rules & Regulations for the Candidates Tournament of the FIDE World Championship cycle 2016-2018
[...]
12. Regulations for the FIDE Candidates Tournament 2020
Conclusion: Communication is not the strong point of the current FIDE management. The former FIDE management, despite their many shortcomings, did a better job of documenting their decisions.
The information about the next cycle is scattered across different documents and, although it's consistent, I couldn't find a single document pulling everything together. The subdomain for womenchess.fide.com is also hopelessly out of date. I'll come back to this at the same time I update the other data -- PGN and the Index of Women Players -- for the Kazan Candidates event. There might be a basic document that I've overlooked.
I was pleased with the correlation between my data and the ZQP [zonal qualifying paths] data. It was even better than I had hoped for and confirmed my belief that the ZQP data is an excellent source of info on the early FIDE zonals and interzonals.
That gave me a green light to proceed with the earlier World Championship cycles, C01-C12. An overview of C12 is shown in the following chart. It lists the players who competed in the three interzonals for that cycle.
The 1st & 3rd columns are from the ZQP data. The 2nd & 4th columns are from my own pages. The 2nd column shows in which interzonal the player participated and corresponds to the following list:-
The 4th column corresponds to the zonal numbering on my page (C12) 1981-1984 Zonal Cycle. Players who didn't qualify from a zonal were seeded on other criteria.
I added the crosstable and PGN for the first event in the
2019 Grand Prix.
The tournament's logo is shown to the left. For more about the logos for the new Grand Prix, see
Magic Beasts Are the Key Visuals for the 2019 Grand Prix Series
(worldchess.com).
For more about the current cycle, see FIDE Starts the New Cycle (May 2019). For the last post about the Grand Prix in the previous cycle, see 2017-18 GP (December 2017).
