The final two rounds of the 2023 Sue- Maroroa Memorial NZ Women’s Chess Championships will be played today at the Howick Information Centre.
The tournament has been extremely hard fought with some extremely close matches being played out. The tournament features two former NZ Women’s Champions Women’s FIDE master Vivian Smith and Jennya Charomova, both former NZ Olympiad representatives.
Also featuring in the field are a lot of the younger generation of women players including several Olympiad squad members. Both Luna Xu and Luna Lu are only 9 and both won age group gold medals at the Oceania Junior Championships held in Melbourne earlier this year.
Another 9-year-old player Olivia Li started the tournament strongly by drawing with the top seed Isabelle Ning in round one and then went on to defeat 10 times Women’s Champion Viv Smith.
The board one pairing in round 6 this morning is between the top seed Women’s Candidate Master Isabelle Ning on 4.5 points and Sarah Sun on 4 points.