CHESS IRELAND / About

CHESS IRELAND is a regular unofficial information service covering the Irish chess scene and the activities of Irish chess players in Ireland and abroad. The site has been in existence since April 1995 and attracts between 400-800 readers each week. The founder, editor and webmaster of the site is John Hurley, 34 years old, club player with Crumlin CC (1998 national club champions) in the Leinster Leagues and weekly chess correspondent for the excellent Sunday Tribune.

The site is mainly no thrills text and consists principally of news items appearing in reverse chronological order under Latest news.

The right-aligned column provides Chess Links to the major international chess sites such as TWIC, Kasparov Chess and New in Chess as well as to all of the local Irish chess sites (clubs and organisations).

A series of small links to other site resources are available on the horizontal navigation bar

The bulletin board / results link is a basic, interactive facility allowing players to post their comments on any subject of interest to Irish chessplayers. It is also used as a BBS for gathering chess league and tournament results and by myself for information updates when I am using a machine without ftp software.

The games link is to a java games viewer and contains a few, but not many games. I will try and improve this section. Note that there are also collections of games in chessbase format in the archive link.

The email directory link is to a list of over a hundred Irish players' email addresses submitted for inclusion on the site.

The clubs / contacts link gives basic contact information about all Irish clubs. See also the links on the right-hand column to individual club sites.

Out-of-date news items are stored in an archive link which goes back as far as the beginning of 1997 ... unfortunately, I failed to keep any of the earlier htm files. Also stored here are various contributions from readers, games collections in chessbase format and other items of interest.

The ratings link includes links to FIDE lists and to some recent ICU rating lists. Regarding national ratings, the ICU doesn't get around to publishing lists very often unfortunately though I understand that new rating software may change that. The best information resource for Irish FIDE (international) ratings is on IM Mark Orr's Irish Chess Archive.

The top links are to The Week in Chess, The Irish Chess Archive, The Leinster Chess Union and the The Irish Correspondence Chess Association.

All information (except junkmail) is gratefully received and much of it published. Please pass on the CHESS IRELAND URL to any online players who might be interested. Send on your email addresses if you want to be included in the email directory. All suggestions, comments welcome

Check out the site.