The Week in (Irish) Chess

Essentially all readers are familiar with The Week in Chess. (For those who are not: it’s a weekly report on tournaments worldwide in the previous week, usually with several thousand games; one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern Chess World and indispensable for the tournament player.) But (I will guess) most are not familiar with a small format change that occurred about a year ago, starting with TWIC 829: for the first time, all games included the FIDE IDs of each player.

With this change, it is much easier to filter for games by Irish players, since FIDE rating lists with FIDE ID and nationality are available on-line. You might think that it should be easy to compare player names to FIDE or ICU (or UCU) lists. Not so! In practice the same name is often given in several different forms in different lists, and even from year to year in the same list, so the same player will appear as Joe Ryan (FM), J. Ryan, Jo. Ryan, Joseph Ryan, or Joseph D. Ryan, say. In some cases two (or more) players have the same name: the “A. Smith” problem. And so on. All quite messy, and all solved by adding FIDE IDs.

On the (new) Games page, I’ve added the results of filtering all TWICs that include these IDs, i.e., issue numbers 829 to 884, 27^th September 2010 to this week. Any game in which either player is Irish is included, and also any game played in Ireland is included: the tournaments covered were Bunratty, Kilkenny, the Irish championship, and the City of Dublin IM. 835 games in all, with 67 Irish players featured. The players, with number of games for each, are:

Allen, Keith: 6
Astaneh Lopez, Alex: 20
Baburin, Alexander: 13
Benson, Nicola: 9
Benson, Oisín P.: 8
Brady, Stephen: 18
Breen, Anthony: 65
Byrne, Ray: 6
Cafolla, Peter: 27
Cassidy, John: 4
Collins, Sam: 74
Courtney, John: 14
Crichton, Martin: 9
Daly, Colm: 27
Daly, Patrick: 2
Delaney, John: 9
Doyle, Hugh: 15
Duffy, Séamus: 6
Egan, Colm: 2
Fitzsimons, David: 26
Fox, Anthony: 29
Freeman, Gordon: 26
Griffiths, Ryan-Rhys: 43
Hayes, Peter J.: 5
Healy, Tom: 4
Hearne, Sarah-Jane: 9
Hegarty, Sarah N.: 76
Heidenfeld, Mark: 15
Keogh, Eamon: 9
King, Melvyn: 9
Larter, Nick J.: 6
Loughran, John: 9
Lynch, Peter J.: 2
Magee, Rónán: 17
McCabe, Darren: 8
McGovern, Mark E.: 4
McMahon, Daire: 9
McMaster, Richard: 6
McMorrow, John: 5
Meskens, Stephan: 6
Mirza, Diana: 9
Mirza, Gabriel: 3
Moran, Stephen: 9
Moynihan, Kieran: 6
Murray, David: 16
Murray, Jim G.: 2
Nicholson, John: 6
O’Connell, Gerard: 9
O’Connor, Jonathan: 12
O’Driscoll, Kieran: 10
O’Leary, Matt: 11
O’Rourke, Ray: 9
Orr, Mark J. L.: 1
Osborne, Sam: 5
Porter, Liam: 6
Quinn, Mark: 1
Quinn, Rory: 14
Redmond, John P.: 16
Reynolds, Pat: 9
Ryan, Joe: 28
Shaughnessy, Elizabeth: 8
Short, Philip: 15
Smith, Andrew Philip: 8
Twomey, Pat: 8
Wall, Gavin: 21
Wallace, Paul: 18
Welsh, Michael: 9

Of course there’s some overlap with the ICU games archive, but I count 264 games there in the same time period so most of the games here are not on the ICU site.

All in pgn format for the moment; at some point the games will be run through the same processor as is used for the tournament reports. Also we’ll be updating the list week by week.