New season starting on 18 September

We are returning to our winter home of the Bridge Centre on Thursday 18 September; we will be there until summer 2015, meeting every Thursday – except over Christmas/ New Year and Easter.

We will start off, as has become traditional, with a blitz tournament on the 18th.  Everybody is very welcome: both familiar faces and new.  The tournament is a friendly one (serious and light-hearted at the same time) so don’t be afraid to come along if you haven’t been before.  All games will be played at the rate of five minutes per player per game, with each player also receiving an increment of five seconds per move.  (If you have a chess clock that supports increments, please bring it along.  If not, then just bring yourself – and as many friends as you can! – as the club should have enough equipment of its own for everybody, unless we are overwhelmed by new arrivals.)  The tournament should be finished well before 11, if we get to start on time: enter when you arrive.

The Winter League (which is what we call the club championship) will start on 30 October, and run through the winter (hence the name!) with one game every three or four weeks.  This is a more serious tournament, with games lasting all evening (the time rate is 90 minutes per game plus an increment of ten seconds per move) and rated by the Irish Chess Union.  Details of how to enter will be posted shortly.  If you can’t wait, then reply here or email us at galwaychess [at] gmail [dot] com.

A new venture is the Rapid Play tournament, which will also take place throughout the winter, on the first Thursday of every month [except January, when it will be on the 8th, and not 1st January].  More information about that is in the item immediately below this one.

And finally, of course there is the Galway Congress, coming up on the weekend of 17 to 19 October.  That will be in the Menlo Park Hotel.  (Everything else mentioned here will take place in the Bridge Centre, our normal venue.)  The Galway Congress is a sizeable tournament (last year there were 152 entries – the third largest in Ireland), which attracts many players to Galway from throughout Ireland and elsewhere: we have had entrants from American, Australia, Latvia, Poland and several other distant countries, as well as nearer ones such as England.  Full information about that is in the Congress: 2014 link at the top of the page.  Entries are now flooding in (well, trickling, to be exact), so get your entry in soon!

All in all, it looks like being a good season.  Hope to see you there.