Rapidplay 2022: Entrants
Name Rating Andrew Barber Max Cook Benjamin Gacquin Paul Gaffney Eoin Galvin Conor Haran James Lee Vladimir Mabhena Gerard McLoughlin Patrick Murphy Timothy O'Malley Vinayak Verlekar Vivaan Verlekar
The home of chess in Galway
A number of Galway players travelled down to play in the Bunratty Congress (Ireland’s largest and strongest weekend tournament) last weekend, and in general we put up a good account of ourselves.
In the top section (the Masters) Oissine Murphy scored 2½ points out of 6 – a very good result, since all Oissine’s opponents were rated a good bit higher than he was. In this section, one of the stars of the show was Galway-based Phillip Short, who put in an excellent performance, winning the prize for best untitled Irish player, and beating Irish Number One, Alex Baburin; Phillip scored 3½ – which is particularly good when one considers that, of his six opponents, two were grandmasters and another two international masters.
In the second section (under-2000), three of our members scored 3 points: Paul Ward, Jason Rawlinson, and Pete Morriss (who got his three points from only four games; he didn’t play on the Sunday, in order to attend a funeral); David Baird got 2 points, starting with a fine win, but not quite managing to keep that up. Paul Ward’s results are particularly meritorious, as he is actually rated below the supposed floor for the section: he gained 34 rating points from his efforts, which was the second highest gain in the section.
In the under-1600 section, there was a very fine performance from Kenneth Higgins, who came second equal on 5/6. Ger Abberton finished on 3 points, and Kevin Fitzpatrick on 2.
Finally, in the under-1200s, David Piercey didn’t quite manage to repeat his exploits in the Galway Congress, finishing on 2½ points.
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