Report

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The Cork Congress was held in the Gresham Metropole Hotel from the 23rd to the 25th of March. There were a total of 125 players one less than last year, so people are still playing chess despite the debt that Quinn & Co have lumped us with. That's Sean not Mark Quinn! It was great to see so many new minors playing with 51 in that section, with Daniel Lynch bringing 23 from Gonzaga. I'm sure many of the minors won't be in that section for long, but there is no doubting the winner Fionn O'Neill with 6 out of 6 and a performance rating of over 1600 will be in the Majors if not the Masters section soon. Joint second in that section were Rory Plant and Fergal Bohan. The best under 925 was Patrick O'Mahony with two best unrated players Peter Urwin and Kieran Burke and the best rating performance went to John Connolly.

The Major section was also well attended with 41 players and was a much tougher contest at the top with three coming joint first, Cork club member Marco Piazza, Pat Coleman and Ljubisa Cirkovic. The best under 1450 was Niki Mullins and the best under 1300 was Emmet Mordaunt.

The Masters was down to 33 players, probably due to the fact that e2e4 are hosting a big tournament in Dublin at Easter. Dejan Bojkov took the spoils with 5/6 and four coming joint second Alex Baburin, John Donaldson and two Cork men Philip Short and Alex Lopez. Reinier Jaquet was best under 2000 player.

Dejan has again written in his blog about his experience in Cork and comments on the fact that local player Kieran O'Riordan is the only one to defeat him in his two visit here. http://www.dejanbojkov.blogspot.com/

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