Although he thought he qualified, former FIDE World Champion Ruslan Ponomariov, together with five other GMs, was not invited to the FIDE World Blitz Championship, to be held in Astana, Kazakhstan from 1 to 11 July. In a blog on ChessVibes, Ponomariov writes that "already in February 2011 a selection was made where me and another five players were qualified to play in the World Blitz Championship."

At the end of May, FIDE announced on its website the next World Blitz & Rapid Championships 2012. They will be held in Astana, Kazakhstan from 1 to 11 July. The World Chess Federation used the January 2012 rating list to select the participants:

The 10 top rated players of the FIDE January 2012 rating list qualify directly to the final tournament of each event and they should send their player's contract to the FIDE Secretariat by Friday 8 June to confirm their participation.

This leads to the following list of qualifiers (the eventual participants list might look very differently):

1. Carlsen, Magnus
2. Aronian, Levon
3. Kramnik, Vladimir
4. Anand, Viswanathan
5. Radjabov, Teimour
6. Topalov, Veselin
7. Karjakin, Sergey
8. Ivanchuk, Vassily
9. Morozevich, Alexander
10. Gashimov, Vugar

As Ruslan Ponomariov points out at his ChessVibes blog today, with this list FIDE is not taking into account the World Blitz qualifier which was held after the Aeroflot Open, on February 17th, 2011. This tournament provided six qualifiers (Shakhriyar Mamedyarov, Ruslan Ponomariov, Dmitry Andreikin, Evgeny Tomashevsky, Wesley So and Nikita Vitiugov) for the next World Blitz Championship, which was to be held after the Tal Memorial in November 2011.

Aeroflot 2011 | World Blitz Qualifier | Final Standings (top 10)

As it turned out, the Russian Chess Federation decided not to organize the World Blitz and so the event didn't take place in 2011. For 2012 the Kazachstan Chess Federation has offered to organize the tournament again (in 2008 Leinier Dominguez won the tournament in Almaty). FIDE decided not to use the results of the 2011 qualifier, which apparently was only intended for a championship organized by the Russian Chess Federation in 2011.

As a result of a lack of communication between FIDE, the Russian Chess Federation and the players, at least one grandmaster is surprised about the invitation procedure. Ponomariov, who provides a number of his blitz games in his blog, writes:

There has been no explanation, no apologies, and personally I wonder whether there is any logic on the part of the organizers where the selection of finalists is concerned. Apparently, they have taken into account the January 2012 rating list, but first of all, this list represents classic chess results, and not blitz; second, this is just one list, whereas FIDE usually makes an average out of several lists. For example, for the selection of players for the Grand Prix they used the lists of January 2012 and July 2011. I think it could be a better idea to consider the results from the latest World blitz championship, European blitz championship or even the Mind Games if you still don't have ratings for blitz and rapid.

We contacted a FIDE official to react, but for logistical reasons he was not able to comment today.

More at Ruslan Ponomariov's blog, where the Ukrainian top GM also gives his opinion about the Anand-Gelfand match.