Some items this month that weren’t the subject of separate posts:
Games archive: The ICU games archive is an excellent resource and represents a huge amount of effort by its originators (John Hurley and Mark Orr deserve much of the credit, I believe). But it seems there is no particular effort being made to keep it up to date. I’d like to aim at making the IRLchess archive the most comprehensive and current resource for Irish games.
With this in mind, I’ve steadily been adding games to the archive on these pages, all searchable via the “Search Games” feature in the right column. After some reworking of the routines this month, the process is now much simpler, so whenever a new game appears on a club web page or blog, it’s relatively straightforward to grab it and convert to a playable .htm file. I’m leaving out comments (too tricky to handle, apart from any issues of getting permission) but am adding sources, references and links where available.
Games added this month include:
Sheehan-Gibson, “Dublin league” 1997
Dooley-Dunne, Branagan Cup 1997
K. Delaney-R. Quinn, National Club Ch 2009
O’Brien-O’Donnell, Munster League 2011-12
Noonan-O’Grady, Shannon Masters 2011-12
Masterson-Waters, Ballynafeigh June Rapid 2012
Wall-Curtin, UT San Antonio Open 1992
plus half a dozen more.
You may notice that the search takes a few seconds (10-20) to generate results. In one sense this isn’t ideal, of course, but there’s a reason: each search causes each and every .htm file on the site to be opened and checked to see if it matches the search terms. So search results are always automatically up to date: as soon as a new .htm file is loaded, it appears in the search results. For future development: a speedier search, and a speedy way of generating an up-to-date pgn file of all the games on the site (to this end, the pgn source is embedded into the .htm file, as you’ll see if you do a ‘View Source’ on the files above).
Simuls: A couple of new events have been added to the Local Simuls page: these were simuls given by Alexander Baburin in 2005 and 2006. In addition, Ciarán Quinn and Philip Reilly sent in comments on simuls given by Bronstein, Spassky, and Geller. For Bronstein, I’m happy to say there is plenty of information: David McAlister sent a scan of the report in the ICJ, complete with several games, so it’s just a matter of getting around to processing it. For Spassky and Geller, though, any help would be greatly appreciated. I think Geller also played a game against three opponents in consultation? (David Dunne, Jonathan O’Connor, Paul Delaney?). I recall seeing a photo in the Dublin C.C. rooms.