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?