Irish Women's Championship 2025

[ Information | Pairings & results | Crosstable | 1st | 2nd | 3rd | 4th | 5th | 6th | 7th | Openings | Annotations | Sources ]

Sources and notes

Sources
Flyer Flyer (1-page pdf)
ICU web site
FIDE Tournament ID 477968
Livechesscloud The Irish Women's Championship 2024 (all 40 games plus 2 rapid playoff games) (pgn file)
Chess.com Inaugural Irish Women's Chess Festival 2025 (pgn file)
Chess-Results.com
Facebook
  • Post, August 19, 2024, Irish Chess Union Facebook page (announcing result, with four photos)
Web
  • The annual Kilkenny congress is on this weekend, Tim Harding (archived November 24, 2025) (via the Wayback Machine):
  • “Ireland's first Women's Chess Festival was held over the October bank holiday weekend with several sections. The winner of the 12-player women's championship tournament was the fast-improving Ukrainian teenager Maryna Petrenko with 6/7 but she is ineligible for the title and there was a tie between the highest scoring eligible players.

    We see that the ICU website announces that the new Irish Women's Champion is Alice O'Gorman but we are unsure whether or not there was a play-off.

    There was a tie for second place in the tournament on four and a half points between Diana Mirza, and Nemhain Doolin. This is certainly a step up for the teenager whereas Diana and Alice are now veterans of Irish teams.

    The online tiebreaks show Nemhain placed second, but in one round she took a half-point bye. It would not have been right under those circumstances for mathematics to decide the title and the automatic qualifying place for the next Olympiad. ... ”


Notes
Key In "Pairings & results",
  • "x-ch" denotes former Irish Women's Champions
  • "ol" denotes players from the previous Women's Olympiad team (Budapest 2024)
  • "t-b" denotes tie-break, and lists the results between the eligible tied players
Ratings
  • FIDE ratings are from the October 2025 list.
  • ICU ratings are from the October 2025 list.
Tie-break The tie-break method, which was posted at the venue, was the same as the one for the Irish championship, adopted at the 2018 ICU AGM: see Irish Championship: Terms and Conditions (archived November 25, 2025):

“... 2A. If three or more players tie, then the title shall be awarded to the player, if any, who achieved a greater score in games amongst the tied players than could be achieved by any other tied player under any set of results of unplayed games.
2B. If step 2A does not determine a champion, there shall be a playoff 2-game rapid match between the two players (even if one of these players won the individual game between the two) who achieved the highest scores in games amongst the tied players, counting all unplayed games as draws.”

Here O'Gorman beat Doolin, Doolin beat Mirza, and O'Gorman did not play Mirza. Therefore step 2A did not determine a champion, so there was a rapid playoff match between the two players who achieved the greatest scores in games amongst the tied players, counting all unplayed games as draws (O'Gorman 1½; Doolin 1; Mirza ½). In applying this, the tied players were taken as the eligible tied players, i.e., the first tie-break criterion was, in effect, eligibility for the title.

O'Gorman won the rapid playoff 2-0 (pgn file).
Versions
  • v1.0 (25 Nov 2025): first published version.
Contributors Seán Coffey


IRLchess: Irish chess history & records.
Version 1.0, published 25 November 2025. Comments/corrections? .
Download pgn file.