IRLchess

J.J. Walsh has sent the news that Alex Montwill, who has been mentioned here several times, died two weeks ago, on April 18^th. He was 78.

As previously discussed here, he finished equal first in an Irish championship but was never Irish champion, losing out on tie-break in the 1962 championship in Derry (8-round Swiss, 16 players, finishing =1^st-4^thon 5½/8 with John B. Reid, Michael Littleton, and Brian Reilly; Reid and Littleton were declared joint Irish champions on tie-break). However he had the consolation of being (joint) Irish correspondence champion in 1963. He also played on two winning interprovincial Leinster teams in 1961 and 1964, on boards 11 and 5 respectively in the finals. He gave up chess relatively early and switched instead to bridge (as did so many other Irish players over the years), where he was apparently a very strong player.

He was most prominent (and apparently very well known) as a physicist, and was a Professor of Experimental Physics at UCD, where he worked in one capacity or another for over 40 years.

In a 43-minute interview from an Institute of Physics Ireland event in 2010, he gives many interesting details of his background. He was born in Riga, Latvia around 1935, and recalled the family hiding from invading Soviet troops during the war, moving around in Lithuania and Poland for a few years and ending in Germany. He moved to Ireland in 1947; apparently not just any refugee could do so at the time, and some connection to Ireland was required. In his case, one of his ancestors, an O’Rourke, was one of the Wild Geese, and a branch of the family, all O’Rourke’s, ended up over the centuries working for the Tsars.

A brief biographical summary has been added to the main players page. A more detailed page will be added at some point. The ICU games archive has just two of his games; does anyone know of any others?

Colm Daly’s galling near-miss of an IM norm last month happened just as I was leaving for a trip to Shanghai–as I left the house I thought he had it in the bag. Disappointing! But that is the way with norms: it seems there are a dozen near-misses for every actual success.

With the topic of norms in mind I remembered Jonathan O’Connor telling me about his near-misses in correspondence chess ten years ago. He earned two SIM norms (Senior International Master, roughly halfway between IM and GM), but fell short of that title, and two SIM norms didn’t automatically translate into an IM title either.

There’s a provision in the ICCF rules for national federations to make an exceptional application, so with time to kill at my meeting I idly tried to see if there was some way of constructing a case for Jonathan, for the IM title at least. The rules are that two norms are needed, covering at least 24 games. Jonathan’s norms were 7 / 10 in the Champions League Qualification Group 7 Board 1 (Category 5: SIM = 7, IM = 6½) and 9 / 11 in the 15th ICCF Correspondence Olympiad preliminaries Section 1 Board 5 (Category 4: SIM = 8, IM = 7½). So two norms, but only 21 games.

With the national exceptional application in mind, and seeing that Jonathan had scored well over the required minimum in each case, for the IM title in particular, I wondered what would happen if extra players were added into each event, without lowering the category, and Jonathan had just lost the extra games, but still leaving him with valid norms in the hypothetical expanded event. I found that 7 / 11 is enough for an IM norm for category 5, and 9 / 13 for category 4. So 24 games. Well, well, well!

But there was another pleasant surprise: when I searched on the ICCF site for how to go about making the case, and how previous applications for national exceptional applications had been formatted, I found that the 2011 ICCF Congress had codified this exact procedure into the regulations, because so many others had had exactly the same idea and there had never been an objection.

I submitted the writeup to Tim Harding, Ireland’s ICCF representative, who forwarded to the ICCF, and today the answer arrived from the ICCF Qualifications Commissioner: title approved, and indeed already recorded on the ICCF website, medal and certificate to be awarded at the ICCF Congress in Poland in July.

Congratulations to Jonathan! A richly deserved honour: he had a very high success rate for norms (2 norms out of the only 3 events he played) and would surely have gained the title long ago if he had had the time to spend on more tournaments.

My only regret is that we didn’t arrange to have the notification delivered on April 1, just to make it interesting. It only occurred to me afterwards.