The Sligo Spring Tournament had four sections in all, and the organisers made live boards available for all games in each. Full reports have been added here for the Championship (40 players, 1st Nitish Arun), the Major (44 players, 1st Christopher Woods), and the Challenger (87 players, 1st Cal Nolan).
There was a glitch in the live boards for the Championship, or so it seems to me. The results shown on live boards for round 4 diverged in many games from those shown on Chess-Results and recorded in rating reports. This often happens for an isolated game or two, and can happen when one player loses on time, or where the live board feed fails and there are unrecorded moves. But here there seemed to be too many for those explanations to be plausible. For the report, I deleted the moves of all round 4 games, but give references to the live board feeds, and also a pgn file that includes the games in question.
One striking game occurred in the Challengers, and involved the eventual winner, Cal Nolan of St. Benildus. Here I’d like to acknowledge Kevin Burke’s post on the St. Benildus C.C. web site, which included an annotation of this game.
20. ?
Here 20. Nxe5+ wins straightforwardly enough, but White played the natural 20. Nd6+, and after 20… Kh8, followed up with 21. Bxe5.
But this latter move turns out to be a mistake. Black struck with 21… Bxg2+!, and after 22. Kxg2, could have mated quickly by 22… Bg3+!. In the game, Black missed the chance and played 22… Bxe1+, which loses. Still, this was an excellent effort for the Challenger section, for players rated under 1200 (higher of FIDE and ICU).
After the continuation 20. Nd6+ Kh8 from the diagrammed position, how should White have continued? Was the win still there?
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