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, 4th 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 362nd 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.