The Limerick open and U-1400 was held on the weekend of the 24th of October in the Savoy hotel. The open section was dominated by players from Trinity chess club with 4 of their players finishing in the top 4 joint places. Stephen Moran finishing Joint Second with the rapidly improving Tom O’Gorman and Ioana Gelip finishing outright first. Ioana is a 2100+ who has recently moved here from Romania and has joined the Trinity Armstrong team this year and will considerably strengthen their challenge for the league this season. Ioana is the first woman to win the Limerick Open or any open section In Ireland since Susan Arkell won the Mulcahy in 1987! She finished with an impressive 5.5 out of 6 beating Tom in the last round. Grading Prizes were won by Thomas Dunne Jnr (u-1800) with 4/6 and Dennis Ruchko (u-1400) with 3.5/6.
The u-1400 section was won by Jonathan Peoples on 5.5/6, second place went to David Remenyik with 5/6 and finishing third with 4.5/6 was Diarmuid Reidy. The grading prizes went to Ludmila Podzimkova with 4/6, Dylan Murphy 3/6 and Mateo Plaza Reino 3/6.
While most of the plaudits will go to Ioana and Tom, there were some very impressive performances from some of our junior players too. Padraic Sheehy had a very strong tournament finishing on 4/6 in the open, Dennis Ruchko 3.5/6 in the u-1400 section, Jonathan Peoples and David Remenyik scoring 5.5/6 and 5/6 respectively, this will see these juniors earn good rating gains and I expect to see them challenging even more in future.
Photographs from the event can be seen at www.limerickchessclub.net
Ioana kindly annotated her last round game which can be viewed here.
Created 2015-11-09 ◦ Last updated 2015-12-02 ◦ Editor AK