Checkmate! Limerick students take on massive online chess event

LIMERICK schools have taken part in what organisers believe is the largest single online chess event in Irish history.

The event, which took place on Friday, September 18, was called Ireland's Big Chess Day.

251 schools nationwide took part, with almost 500 classrooms and over 9,000 children all learning how to play chess live, online.

18 Limerick schools participated in the event.

Tomás Fitzpatrick, co-founder of ChessCraft, a digital chess game, trained as a primary school teacher at Mary Immaculate College (MIC) and taught the chess event himself.

He explained: “Almost two years ago I started teaching chess in classrooms that had nobody to run it, and ended up building a one-to-many broadcast platform to do it at scale with my co-founder, Oisín Flynn.”

Lifelong chess players, the pair first introduced the game to MIC by establishing the MIC Chess Club in their second year, and represented the college internationally.

The pair started with in-person chess workshops around Munster eighteen months ago.

Tomás said: “Last Friday's event ran beginner lessons followed by puzzle competitions between schools, all delivered live from one broadcast to hundreds of classrooms at once — a model I don't think exists elsewhere in Irish education.”

“This is what it's grown into, and we're genuinely taken aback by how schools responded to it,” he added.