Anyone at all interested in Irish chess is surely following the progress of the Irish teams at the Olympiad in Istanbul. The live games coverage is outstanding, the captain of the open team, Colm Daly, is also reporting progress on his blog, and there’s discussion on the LCU Blog. (An outstanding result for the open team today, losing 2½-1½ to an Israeli team that outrated them by well over 200 points on every board, and at that Ireland was unlucky not to do better.)
In any case, I don’t plan to post here again until the Olympiad is over, barring some compelling reason, on the grounds that the chess reading-time budget of most readers will already have been used up by the Olympiad. So expect to see new posts here around September 10 or so.
Sadly Alex Lopez missed the GM norm. Unfortunate, as on paper it seemed a great opportunity: playing White, against a player rated a manageable 2428, and who had been playing well below that level in the tournament that far, and for a 20-game norm. But it didn’t work out and indeed it seemed as if he never got much traction at all in this game.
The requirements for these norms are artfully chosen, as it seems very often that a player falls just ½ point short.
I looked in Big Database 2012 for other games from his opponent, Muñoz Santana, but didn’t see any there at all; strange.