01 June 2016

Searching for Zonals

The mention of a page on the 1972 Caorle zonal (FIDE zone 1) in My Name in Bytes led to an index page on ChessScotland.com: World Championship - Zonal Tournaments.
Under the earlier format of qualification tournaments used to find a challenger to the World Champion, several Scottish players took part in Zonal tournaments. Here is a selection of these events.

That index page currently leads to pages on eight zonals held between 1951 and 1975. There is also a separate page for each of the Scottish participants in those events.

Whenever I work on my own zonal pages, I spend most of my time looking for events where I'm missing basic documentation. What about looking for events where I already have a full crosstable? I used this idea to search on the two winners of 1972 Caorle -- Ljubojevic and Ivkov -- and discovered a number of promising leads. An example from my own backyard is Belgian Chess History - Zonal Tournament.

Although I could do the same search on all of the documented zonals, there are more than 400 such events. Is there a way to prioritize these? How about searching for events where I have less than a full crosstable? Using 1969 Mar del Plata as an example -- an event won by Najdorf and Panno -- I couldn't find a crosstable on the web, but I didn't spend much time on it.

This idea is worth pursuing, but first I have to catalog events with less than a full crosstable. Such a list would also be useful for a library visit.

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