Galway Chess Club

Entries are now open for the Galway Congress, which will be held online on the weekend of 19th to 21st March. Details and information about how to enter are in the Galway Congress 2021 tab above.

The next Galway Chess Congress is scheduled for the weekend of 19th to 21st March 2021. It seems likely that, thanks to coronavirus, we will again be unable to hold it in our normal way in the Menlo Park Hotel. We really don’t want to lose the Congress for the second year in a row, and so we are intending to hold it online, which we hope will be better than nothing. Further information will be available early in 2021, but we are announcing it now so that you can put these dates in your diary.

We’re moving online for this year’s Galway Winter League. All details are here: http://www.galwaychess.com/galway-online-winter-league/

Get your entries in as soon as possible!

Zero entry fees! Zero prizes! Four fun!

New team competition for clubs in Ireland every Friday at 7pm .. for link go to www.icu.ie

We very much regret that given the widespread concern about coronavirus, and in particular the Government’s announcement on 12 March, we feel that we are now forced to cancel the Galway Chess Congress. We have refunded entry fees to all entrants.

We may be able to reschedule later in the year, but we will not take a decision about that until it is clear that coronavirus is no longer a problem.

Due to Storm Dennis, Tralee were unable to travel and our games for round 5&6 were postponed. These games will be replayed at a later date in Limerick.
This Sunday we had 2 tough games against Ennis B and Cork B.
Players were David Andreu, Diego Rodriguez, Andrew Finnerty, James Blackwell and Zoran Dragic

We finished with a score of 4 – 1 against Ennis B, where the standout game was Diego winning in only 13 moves.
We then played a strong Cork B team getting a score of 3.5 – 1.5 with a lot of the games going down to the wire.

These two wins and some fortunate results from other matches, mean that we are in a good position to win Div 2 of the Munster League if we can beat Charleville in the next round on the 19th of April.
Well done to Andrew Finnerty in particular for winning both games against higher rated opponents!

Match results and rankings can be found here, though not all games reported yet.
http://munsterchessunion.org/league2_summary_2020.php
Individual game results can be found here
http://munsterchessunion.org/league2_game_details_2020.php

Entries to brendan@chessossity.com numbers are limited and will be allocated on a first come first registered basis.

And for Secondary Schools we have the Connaught Cup being held in the Ardilaun on Wednesday the 11th of March, teams of 6 players .. email Brendan to register.

We had a relatively low turnout at the start of the February Blitz, though some more players joined in later. In the event, the tournament became rather a two-horse race between Pete Morriss and Brian Gallagher. They met in round 3, and Pete managed to win their game, somewhat fortuitously. They both then defeated the rest of the field (though most of their games were hard fought) leaving Pete still a point ahead at the start of the last round, with the rest nowhere. Pete then won again, whilst Brian was defeated by last month’s joint-winner Diego Rodriguez, to make the final gap look more comfortable than it had felt: thus Pete Morriss was the winner with 7 wins out of 7, and Brian Gallagher second with 5/7. The rating prize went to Ger Abberton, who scored 3½ points.

The next Galway Blitz tournament will be on Thursday 20th February, at our usual venue of upstairs in the Bridge Centre, St. Mary’s Road.  We’ll play seven rounds, at 5 minutes for each player per game plus an increment of 5 seconds a move.  Start time is 7.45, and we expect to finish before 11.

Looking forward to seeing you all.