Talk:FIDE Women's Grand Prix 2015–16

Why are there 17 players now
Four tourneys times 12 players per tournament divided by 3 tourneys per player gives 16 players total. Now there are 17. My first guess was Zhukova (how got she in the GP?) has been a replacement for someone, but now she already played a second tourney. Guess we'll know more when the entry list for the third stop is out. -Koppapa (talk) 20:50, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
 * I had the same problem (writing for the german language Wikipedia). I mailed FIDE and they (Geoffrey Borg) told me that there will be a fifth tournament in Lviv and Zhukova was nominated by this city. There will be 20 players alltogether with everyone playing 3 tournaments. Official announcement will be end of this month. I hope they will announce the additional 3 players by this time.--Romulus (talk) 16:20, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

About Hou Yifan
I added the paragraph explaining why Hou Yifan dropped out of the Grand Prix cycle, but I have two editorial comments. The first is that Hou is right. The way that FIDE has decided to choose the Women's World Champion is ridiculous. It is likely to have 2 world champions for every cycle: the first is the winner of the knockout and the second is the winner of the match. To have an uninterrupted reign as world champion, a player would have to win the knockout and then win against the Grand Prix winner, and as Hou says, the knockout tournament has a much larger luck factor, because you can be eliminated for having one bad day.

My second comment is that this is very unpleasant politically and that Hou Yifan deftly and disdainfully ignores the political aspects of it as a champion should. The knockout FIDE system was devised after Hou established herself as the premier female chessplayer on the planet, to keep the Women's Championship in a state of perpetual confusion and to allow someone other than a Chinese player to have it for a while. To remain world champion continuously, a player would have to win both the knockout tournament and the WC match every cycle. The FIDE scheduled the knockout in 2014 *after* Hou was scheduled to play in a tournament in Hawaii. I was following Hou's amazing career then and it seemed to me that it was done intentionally, to keep her out of the knockout. FIDE is run by Kirsan Ilyumzhinov who is quite frankly kind of a nut, a pal of Vladimir Putin and dedicated to seeing that the old Soviet hegemony of chess-playing continues. No Chinese need apply. 173.174.85.204 (talk) 01:02, 1 July 2016 (UTC)Eric
 * Thanks for the comment, but we have to be careful about how we word it, as we have to have a neutral point of view. The block of text could do with a little copyediting, but thanks for being bold and putting the paragraph in. Jkmaskell (talk) 15:09, 1 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Thank you. I tried to keep the article neutral, and of course you may correct any biases that you perceive in it. Here in talk, I felt that I could explain more fully what was going on, as I saw it. 173.174.85.204 (talk) 01:30, 2 July 2016 (UTC)Eric