Ireland’s own chess champ
QUESTION Who is the most successful Irish chess player ever?
THE most successful chess player for the Irish Chess Union is a Russian – Alexander Baburin.
Baburin was born in 1967 in a big city, then called Gorky, and now called Nizhny Novgorod, about 500km east of Moscow. He came from a working-class background and his mother was from the countryside.
His father taught him to play chess when he was seven. Then when he was eight a woman called Ideya Blagonadezhnaya came to his school and started a chess club. She was his coach for many years and her husband also pitched in, giving a lot of chess tuition to the young Alexander.
The young boy also liked physical sports a lot but eventually, when he had to choose between basketball and chess, he chose the latter. By the early 1990s he had become one of the highest-rated chess players in the world, with a rating of 2,550. Then in 1993 came a fateful meeting with one of the great Irish chess players of recent decades, Eamon Keogh.
The two met up at a tournament in France and, as a result, Alexander began playing in some Irish tournaments. Towards the end of 1993, Alexander, his wife Elena and their son Ivan, who was then three, decided to move to Dublin.
Alexander has said that part of his reason for moving to Ireland was that he wanted to see different countries and to travel more.
‘We are born on this planet and belong to it,’ he said. ‘National and racial differences should not prevent people from exploring the whole world.’
One of the other reasons he wanted to move here was to learn English. He has since said that the family’s move worked out well. ‘I learned a lot and I like the country where I am living now,’ he said.
He became Irish chess champion in 2008, the first year that he had entered the competition.
Baburin had been reluctant to enter previous competitions because of adverse comments from some fellow Irish chess players about his Russian origins.
But today Alexander is the highest-ranked member on the Irish chess team and he is also Ireland’s only chess grandmaster.
He also gives many talks about chess around the country and is the editor-in-chief of Chess Today, the first internet-based daily chess newspaper. While Alexander has been without doubt the most successful chess player to play for Ireland, many other Irish-born chess players have hit the high spots over the years.
Chess is one of the longestestablished games in Ireland, played since medieval times, far surpassing in longevity such games as GAA and football.
The Dublin Chess Club, set up in 1813 and which lasted for six years, was the first proper Irish chess club. The Irish Chess Association was established in 1885.
The Armstrong League is the oldest Irish team and has played every year since 1888, making it the oldest competitive chess team in the world.
The present governing body for the game in Ireland, the Irish Chess Union, dates to 1912.
Going back to the 1880s, James Mason was an Irish-born chess player who was ranked one of the world’s top six players.
Before that, for almost a year, from August 1877 to June 1878, he was ranked the world’s number one player. In much more recent times, Irish players such as Colm Daly and Karl McPhillips have been rated exceptionally highly.
In 2016, the former had an FIDE (International Chess Federation) rating of 2,319, while that same year the latter had an FIDE rating of 2,303. But of all the Irish players who’ve been rated so highly over the years, it’s slightly ironic that a Russian player who came to live in Ireland has produced the best chess results for this country.
Dan Donnelly, by email.
QUESTION A Meccano magazine, dated March 1939, described hollow cones that were widely used to deter rats from running up a rope and onto a ship. Are they still in use?
RAT guards, as they are known, are still in use, though they tend to be flat discs rather than cones. On a cruise last year, I saw them used at all our ports of call.
Since the earliest days of navigation, sailors have fought a battle against rats, which get into the holds of ships and attack food stocks. They are the reason that ships often carried a cat.
Until recent times, it was believed the Black Death arrived in Europe and was spread by the fleas living on rats carried on board ships. However, historians believe it’s more likely to have been fleas living on humans.
The typical way for rats to get on board is to clamber along mooring ropes, or hawsers, securing the ship to the dock.
A rat can get into a hollow cone, but isn’t able to climb around the exterior. The modern flat disc has a radius wider than that which the rat can reach to grip the top edge, typically 18in to 20in, so it can’t clamber over.
The disc can be put in place after the ship has been tied up, while a cone has to be fed onto the end of the rope before being secured to a mooring bollard.
Rat guards are a health precaution, preventing the spread of disease. Some ports require their use to stop rats leaving ships and taking diseases ashore.
Farmers have also long fought to keep rats out of their granaries and food stores. The stone mushrooms outside old farm buildings, now seen as decorative, were once used to raise buildings above ground level.
The rats were unable to clamber around the mushroom flat heads to get into the buildings and, as they were made of stone, couldn’t gnaw through them.
Bob Woodford, Northampton.
QUESTION Is the information in aircraft black boxes accessed other than when there is a plane crash?
THERE are two black boxes on an aircraft, which record different data. In theory, one may be accessed, but rarely is.
Black boxes on planes are actually orange, which is obviously a far easier colour to find in the event of an accident.
Both are in the tail of the plane. The first contains the cockpit voice recorder, a microphone that records crew members as well as background noise.
Generally, only 120 minutes of sound from the cockpit can be analysed because the system continuously rewrites over the digitised data. This data can be accessed by the crew, but in practice rarely is.
The flight data acquisition unit has sensors that record 24 hours of flight data such as altitude, velocity, direction of travel and the speed of the rotors.
This data can be accessed only in the event of an accident. It also houses the all-important pinger tracking device.
There have been calls to livestream all aircraft data, but cost is an obstacle.
Alan Bains, Southampton.