Congrats to former Ennis player Gawain Jones who has broken into the Worlds top 100 players. See the January FIDE list for details. All those beery weeknight trips down to such salubrious locations as Mallow and Charleville to play for Ennis in the Munster League weren’t in vain then! Whats next for Gawain I wonder top 50, top 20…top 10??? Gawain next time you are smashing the crap out of some random GM in a luxury hotel somewhere sunny, spare a thought for us poor patzers plugging away in the chess version of purgatory in some grotty pub in the wilds of South Munster where the twin dangers of a passing stranger picking up one of your pieces and flinging it at the wall and a band striking up Irish rebel ballads at eardrum splitting volume in the room next door are ever present. All I can say is that I hope we will see Gawain in an Ennis team again soon, a return spell for Gawain in the Munster League might presage an elevation to even greater heights in the world rankings!?! In fairness it would be a bit like Wayne Rooney turning out for Shamrock Rovers or maybe Limerick City but that would be a cool thing, right?
Hastings is finishing today, round 9 seems to be more or less over and the winner is the top seed Wang Yue of China on a score of 7.5 from 9. Ryan Rhys Griffiths had a decent tournament and would have finished well up the placings had he managed to overcome the wily old campaigner Mark Hebden (another player who has appeared on an Ennis team in the past) on board 9 in the last round. I havent looked through all Ryans games from the event yet but he must be reasonably happy given he was on the same score and the next board to David Howell in the last round.
Other Ennis players haven’t been so lucky lately, Jan Sodoma told me that yesterday he was reading the Ennis blog at work and today he got fired (or was it restructured out of existence?) from his job with a well known English multinational grocey retailer. Crikey I hope the two werent linked! Still on the bright side he will have plenty of time to work on getting his IM title (he has 3 norms +an extra one for good luck but needs 10 more ELO rating points). By coincidence there is a big tournament in Prague soon which might mean he gets his title soon, I wonder if the fortuitous timing of his exit from the job (‘not good work’) had anything to do with this.
Another Ennis player who needs just a clutch of ELO points for a title (the GM one this time) is Petr Neuman, who needs around 40 points for the GM title. I see he finished in 5th place in the recent Czech blitz championship though I am not sure Petr was as happy as he might have been given that he was leading the tournament before a relatively paltry 1.5 from the last 4 rounds meant he slipped down to fifth. He also finished a creditable 5th in a tournament in Aachen in Germany (more famous to me for their 2nd division Bundesliga football team who have won me a few quid on betfair back in the good old days when that league was as predictable as a cuckoo clock). Today he drew with Korneev and has another 2600 tomorrow in some other tournament. How does he find the time to play all these events? One of the benefits of being in a job with flexible hours I guess. Hmmm now where can I find such a job?
Next up for Ennis in the Munster League is matches on 21st January. Ennis B will be keen to revenge their drubbing from earlier in the season in the local derby match. In the other matches the A team will play Limerick and the B team have Adare.
The national club championships will take place on 28th and 29th April this year in Limerick which will make a nice change. Should be an interesting competition this time round!
