About Mark

After discovering the game of chess by chance at six years old, I badgered my parents into bringing me to a chess club, where I took my first steps in the great game.

I played chess for fun in school until I was eleven, when an established Irish international told my mother I was far too immature to ever become a strong player.  I was so annoyed, that I began studying the game seriously. I happened to be attending Gonzaga College in Dublin which had a flourishing chess tradition.  So when I decided to prove my naysayer wrong, I had plenty of stronger players to test myself against on a daily basis. 

Slowly but surely, the hours spent over a chess board paid off and I made it on to teams that won numerous Leinster and All-Ireland titles.  

There were no chess coaches working in Ireland in the 1990s, so Irish players had to find their own path. After competing for Ireland at the World Under 14 chess championships in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin in 1990, I wrote to Romanian GM Mihai Suba who was living in the North of England.   Mihai generously offered to coach me and while I only had the chance to work with Mihai at three International Open events in Hastings, Dublin and Benidorm – there was no internet and no online classes in those days – Mihai’s influence on my chess understanding at this formative moment in my chess development was profound and gave me all the knowledge and confidence I needed to keep working on my own. 

I went on to represent Ireland at the U16 World Championships in Duisburg, Germany and then the U18 World Championships in Szeged, Hungary and then Bratislava, Slovakia.  A high-point in these years was scoring 7/7 on Board 1 at the Marlwood Schools Chess Championship in the UK attaining the Tournament’s Best Performance Prize, as Gonzaga won the title of strongest school team in the British Isles in 1993. That same year, at the age of 17, I became the number 1 ranked player in Ireland. 

Needless to say, I was eternally grateful to that person who dismissed my talent at the grand-old age of eleven, as I might never have applied myself otherwise.

Chess, languages, film and literature were already the overriding passions of my life when I started an Arts Degree in UCD in 1994.  I have only ever been able to remember things that interest me, so getting through the grueling Irish Leaving Cert Examination is probably one of my greatest achievements outside of chess. I was only two months into college when I had to tell my tutors and university professors that I would be skipping town for the month of December to make my Senior debut for Ireland at the Moscow Chess Olympiad in 1994. 

The opportunity to play for Ireland in Russia and to visit the Moscow Central Chess Club not to mention the Pushkin Museum (twice!) on rest days was a dream come true.  This experience was all the encouragement I need to keep playing and studying chess throughout my degree and I went on to compete at Olympiads in Yerevan (1996), Istanbul (2000), Bled (2002), Calvia (2004), Turin (2006) and Dresden (2008).

One of my fondest memories was playing board 1 for Ireland at the incredibly strong European Team Chess Championships in Leon, Spain in 2001. I had been awarded the title of International Master of Chess the previous year at the FIDE Congress during the Istanbul Olympiad.  I was a strong amateur (Elo 2429) at the top of my game and I really enjoyed the challenge of playing against some of the world’s top GMs including Vasilios Kotronias and Alexei Shirov.    

During my years in UCD undertaking a BA, MA and PhD in the School of English, Drama and Film, I coached extensively in Dublin schools and also was head coach to the Irish Team at Glorney Cups in Dublin and Glasgow. I also began tourguiding in 1999 specialising in English and Italian speaking tours of Ireland gaining the qualification of National Tour Guide in 2001.  The Liffey Press also published my first book, The King of Spring: The Life and Times of Peter O’Connor in 2004.  

Since founding Chess Bud Ireland in 2019, I gained the title of FIDE Trainer in April 2020 and have coached regularly for the Irish Chess Union since then. Most recently, I was head coach to the National Junior Chess Squad at the European Schools Chess Championships held in UL, Limerick in 2024.

I started playing on the Kilkenny Armstrong Cup Team in 2001 and my wife Donna and I have made the Marble City our home and that of our kids, Fleur and Nathaniel, since 2019.