Galway Chess Congress 2015 Cancelled

We very much regret to announce that we have been forced to cancel this year’s Galway Chess Congress, which was due to take place on 2^nd to 4^th October 2015..

The reason for the cancellation is that we cannot guarantee that the ICU will rate the tournament, in view of their failure to rate the Galway Rapidplay held at the beginning of June.  As some will remember, for that event the ICU Chairperson wrote to us less than a week before the tournament, making a series of unreasonable and inconsistent demands, with the threat (subsequently carried out ) that the tournament would not be rated if we did not immediately comply with them all.  (The full correspondence can be seen here.)  It remains a strong possibility that something similar will happen to the Congress in three months’ time.

For the Congress we expect in excess of 150 entrants, most of whom will have to book two nights’ accommodation in Galway.  We cannot ask people to make the commitment to play in the tournament if we cannot guarantee that the tournament will take place as advertized by us. Since that lies outside our control, we have decided to take the step to cancel now, so that everybody knows where they stand – including our hosts at the Menlo Park Hotel, who have shown us great consideration, but understandably will have to charge us for the hire of the venue if we were to cancel later than this.

The Galway Congress has become established as one of the three or four best in Ireland, thanks to the hard work put in by a number of people in Galway over the last thirteen years, and the cooperation throughout that period of the ICU. We very much hope that we will be able to run the Galway Congress, as normal, in 2016. It is also possible that this season’s Congress might be rescheduled for early in 2016 if it is possible then to hold the tournament with some confidence.