FIDE new title rules

[Victor Plotkin]

Recently I attended FIDE Qualification Commission (QC) meeting. The goal of the meeting was to inform FIDE members about some changes for FIDE title regulations which will likely be implemented Jan 1, 2022.

There are many minor, mostly technical changes; the main goal of them is to give the QC more power in some specific situations. The major change is that any title application must include at least one norm from an individual swiss tournament with at least 40 participants.

From what I heard during this meeting, QC is very uncomfortable with current title situation and the well-known article in NY Times about the youngest GM in history. They clearly want to stop norm/title achieving by playing exclusively in round-robin or very small swiss events, like Mishra in Budapest. Clearly, the new requirement would make this "easy title route" more difficult.

I fully support this proposal. The vast majority of Canadians who earned a title recently achieved it with 2 or all 3 norms in bid swiss events (GMs Preotu and Hambleton, IMs Kleinman, Chiku-Ratte, Thavandiran and others). So, we have nothing to worry about.

For future Canadian events, it would be important to have Canadian Zonals with 40+ players, so a norm from this event would help title seekers to meet this new requirement.