Top Oceania players

THE top 3 places are occupied by Australia’s 3 grandmasters. GM Zhao Zong-Yuan and current Oceania Zonal champion and World Cup qualifier GM David Smerdon retained their September 2009 ratings and 1-2 places. GM Darryl Johansen lost 3 rating points but kept his 3th place ranking. IM Aleksandar Wohl gained 40 rating points and rose from 11th to 4th place. IM George Xie dropped to 5th place without any rating change.

New Zealand is headed by its only grandmaster Murray Chandler. Young IM Puchen Wang, targeting to become the country’s second grandmaster, is still a far second but keeps on improving.

Papua New Guinea is led by Joselito Marcos who came from a six-year layoff with a rating of 2115. He lost a huge amount of rating points (85!) from the 2009 Oceania Zonal. His last appearance prior to the zonal was in the 2003 PNG chess championship which he won undefeated. Stuart Fancy is in second place with 2104. PNG chess federation secretary, Shaun Press, recent winner of the Solomon Islands international, is tied with Helmut Marko with a rating of 2076.

Despite dropping 67 points (also from the 2009 Oceania Zonal), Damian Norris still leads the Fiji list with a rating of 2053. However, Manoj Kumar is now a near second with just 25 points behind.

Oceania Women Ranking by Country

Here is the list of top women players of each Oceania federations.

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Twin chess problems

WHEN two problems are nearly identical in their setting, but have some slight difference that changes the solution, they are termed twins. The difference may be in the location of a single man...Twin problems sometimes may be formed by a change in the entire location of the men, without any change in the men themselves or in their relation to each other. (Classic Chess Problems by Pioneer Composers by Kenneth S. Howard, 1970, 114 pages)

Twin - two or more problems which are slight variations on each other, composed by the same person. The variation is usually brought about by adding, removing or moving a piece in the initial setup. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_problem_terminology#T)

Twin problems — two (or more) separate but closely related positions — offer tantalizing challenges to composer and solver alike. Sometimes the two positions are identical except that one is shifted up, down, left, or right; often a single piece is relocated. The solutions, of course, though often thematically related, are always different. (Outrageous Chess Problems by Burt Hochberg, 2005, 128 pages)

The following twins were composed by Joselito Marcos from the Philippines. Marcos, a resident of Papua New Guinea since early 1996, is a member of PNG chess federation and has represented PNG in the 2009 Oceania zonal chess championship held in Gold Coast, Australia. He is a member of the PNG team to the 35th chess Olympiad held in Bled, Slovenia in 2002. He has won undefeated the last PNG chess championship in 2003.



White mates in 4
(A) Diagram
(B) Move the black pawn at d7 to b7

Drag your mouse to view the solutions from here Solution (A): 1.Ba7! h4 2.Rb1 h3 3.Rb6! (forming a battery) Kd4 4.Rb4#; Solution (B): 1.Bb6! h4 2.Re1 h3 3.Re6! (a battery is formed only after Black's next move)Nxb6 4.Re4# to here.