2015 World Cup qualifiers

[Christopher Kreuzer]

I was looking at the list on Wikipedia for the 2015 World Cup qualifiers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_Worl ... Qualifiers

Interesting to see that the European Individual Championships had 23 qualifiers each year (2014 and 2015), but the American Continental Chess Championship only get four places each year (the 2015 edition is due to be held in Montevideo, Uruguay, 15-24 May-2015).

Does anyone know why Michael Wiedenkeller (an IM from Luxembourg) is one of the FIDE presidental nominees? When will the other one be announced?

[Roger de Coverly]

Does anyone know why Michael Wiedenkeller (an IM from Luxembourg) is one of the FIDE presidental nominees? When will the other one be announced?

FIDE's own regulations are at
https://www.fide.com/FIDE/handbook/Worl ... ations.pdf

I think they have yet to announce even a provisional list of qualifiers. Not everything on wiki is reliable.

Interesting to see that the European Individual Championships had 23 qualifiers each year (2014 and 2015), but the American Continental Chess Championship only get four places each year

The distribution of qualification places according to the FIDE document is

Europe 46
Americas 20
Asia 20
Africa 6

Outside of Europe, they have retained Zonal tournaments, rather than throw everyone into the Continental Championship pot.

[David Blower]

Would all 128 players who have qualified take part in the competition? Magnus Carlsen is already in the final of the next world championship match, so does he really need to take part in a qualifying event for the candidates tournament?

The other thing is it is still open for me (or anyone else) to qualify from the internet!

[David Sedgwick]

Does anyone know why Michael Wiedenkeller (an IM from Luxembourg) is one of the FIDE presidental nominees?

Weidenkeller won the Zone 1.10 (European Small Nations) Individual Championship held in Cyprus last year. See http://larnaca2014.fide.com/.

By the time that that tournament was arranged, the 46 European places had already been allocated to the two European Individual Championships, as stated in your post. To make a place available for the winner of the Zone 1.10 event, Ilyumzhinov agreed to grant one of his nominations.

[Alex McFarlane]

Will he be allowed to play if Luxembourg are still in arrears to FIDE?

[Brian Towers]

Interesting to see that the European Individual Championships had 23 qualifiers each year (2014 and 2015), but the American Continental Chess Championship only get four places each year

The distribution of qualification places according to the FIDE document is

Europe 46
Americas 20
Asia 20
Africa 6

At first glance, with Europe having half of the qualifiers, this looks unfair. However if you look up Christopher's rating records on the FIDE website you get:

Rating std. 1934

World Rank
World (active players): 41374

Continent Rank Europe
Rank (active players): 33070

So, just over 43,000 active players in the world are better than Christopher with just over 8,000 of those coming from outside Europe. That suggests that Europe shouldn't be getting half of the qualifying spots but three quarters.

Doing the same for Roger gives:

Rating std. 2020

World Rank
World (active players): 29159

Continent Rank Europe
Rank (active players): 23376

Which would suggest an even more extreme split.

[David Sedgwick]

Will he be allowed to play if Luxembourg are still in arrears to FIDE?

Luxembourg are no longer on the list at http://ratings.fide.com/arrears.phtml, so I presume that they've paid up.