IRLchess

Here is a summary of the changes this month that were not the subject of separate posts:

Simuls: Four more simuls were scheduled for February; the one by Michael Adams was eventually cancelled, details of Nigel Short’s two simuls (Dublin and Ennis) have been added, and there was one other, by GM Andrei Istratescu, scheduled for Limerick the Tuesday after Bunratty, but I haven’t seen any results from that one.

Details of J. H. Blackburne’s blindfold simul on 8 boards in Belfast in 1886 have been added, along with (on the Local Simuls page) one by Alexander Baburin in Ballina, 2002.

TWIC Irish games: TWICs 900-903 were processed, with 51 new Irish games, taking the total up to 1065. The latest TWIC, 903, has just one Irish game, in which Joe Ryan somehow grinds out a win in the Coral Colon IM tournament. Without feeding it through an engine, where does Black go wrong? My vote is for 38. … Rxe3: 38. … Kg4 seems much more promising.

DArtt: The post on Korchnoi’s simuls in 1981 brought a correction from Damian Artt, who won his game in Newtownards in the second simul, 4^th February 1981, and knew of at least two others who did so also, whereas the newspaper reports had given Korchnoi’s score as +29 =3 -0.

I was a contemporary of DArtt, as he was known, and we played on the same Glorney Cup team in 1981, but I haven’t heard anything of him in 30 years. It turns out that he has been in the US since 1988, and is currently living in Arizona. He’s another example of the chess-poker connection, having finished in the money three times at the World Series of Poker, most recently finishing 362^nd out of a field of 7,319 in the 2010 Main Event, winning $36,000.

Spam: I assume all web sites must be inundated with spam; certainly IRLchess is no exception, and the spam folder has over 1,400 comments in it. But in the past month there has been a wave of chess-related spam: a series of garbled messages in which a debate is raging back and forth on the merits or otherwise of Ivanchuk, Carlsen, Vasiukov, Geller, etc. It all almost (but not quite) makes sense. But what is the point of it? Bizarre.

Here is a roundup of some of the changes this month that were not the subject of separate posts:

Branagan Cup: Two more winners were added to the roll of honour, based on Hugh Cummins’ tribute to Cormac Brady, in which he says that they were both on the Crumlin teams that won two Armstrongs and two Branagans between 1995 and 1999. Since 1997, 1998, and 1999 were already accounted for, that must mean Crumlin won in 1995 and 1996. (A bit indirect, admittedly, but with the Branagan we’ll take whatever we get.)

Simuls: We’re heading into a bumper month for simuls. In anticipation, details of the three simuls given by Steinitz in Dublin in 1881 have been added, based on Tim Harding’s research, along with several more simuls by local players.

TWIC update: Updates from five new TWICs (895-899) have been added, with 65 new Irish games.

Eugene O’Hare’s memoirs: In a couple of posts, I’ve recommended these memoirs, which are quite entertaining and deserve to be better known, but although I had found the full book on line I didn’t provide a link because I was unsure of the copyright status. However Jack O’Hare, Eugene’s son, has written to say that the book is available both in hardback and as a free pdf download from Lulu: http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?fSearchDataauthor=Eugene+O%27Hare.

Happy New Year all!

Here’s a summary of some new items over the past month, that were not the subject of posts.

Branagan Cup
Up to now the “Leagues” tab here has been completely empty. The plan has always been to include all team events in the scope, and inspired by Seán Terry’s stirring account of the 1977 final, I started looking at records of the Branagan Cup. I’m not sure why it is, but records are very scarce on this competition, even up to this year’s event. A new Branagan Cup page has been added, with winners in 13 years, plus sporadic other information on matches and winning teams. I think this competition was run for the first time in 1973 (to be confirmed) so about 1/3 of the winners are known.

TWIC update
I had skipped updating TWIC for a couple of weeks. The Games page has been updated with the Irish games from TWICs 892, 893, and 894: 51 new games. The full archive from TWIC 829 onwards now has 949 games from 71 players, and a new players and game totals page has been added.

The games from the e2e4 Gatwick International in late October were held back from TWIC to avoid compromising the chances of some competitors in the World Youth Championships in Brazil (see David McAlister’s comment). However, though that tournament is long over and the games have appeared on e2e4′s site, they haven’t appeared in TWIC. Maybe when you lose your place the games never appear there?

Irish championship 2011
The plan at IRLchess is to keep updating tournament reports as new information arrives. With the release of the December issue of the Irish Chess Journal, it became possible to provide links to the August issue, which contains several interesting annotations, in particular Peter Cafolla’s account of his first-round game against Philip Short. Also I found on the Atticus C.C. web site an annotation by John Redmond of his pythonesque squeezing of Jonathan O’Connor. These changes along with a few others have been rolled in to version 1.2 of the tournament report.

Simuls
Last months the Local Simuls page had just started, with just one simul listed. Seven more have been added (of which one is a blindfold simul!) and on the Simuls page, details of Ray Keene’s 1977 simuls have been added. It seems the fashion was to have enormous simuls back then (1970′s), with Keene encountering 53, 54, and 41 on three consecutive days, and Botterill taking on 44 two years later, whereas these days it’s rare to see anyone try much more than 20. Is this by choice of the simul-giver or because of a fall-off in player numbers?