The cover problem commemorates one of the best composers ever, Milan R. Vukcevich, who passed away in the end of May 2003 at the age of 66.
Milan Vukcevich was a GM in composition with 124,67 FIDE Album pointsuntil the Album 1992-1994, an extremely strong solver and active editor in StrateGems. He and his wonderful compositions will be sorely missed.
Luckily for all friends of his problems, a brand new anthology of Milan's problems has recently seen the daylight, My Chess Compositions.
Unfortunately, also other prominent problemists have recently deceased. Aatos Fred, a strong player and solver, passed away in the beginning of April. Fred did not compose much, but for example his study with an interesting initial position is worth a close look, see p. 94. It is not often that we see perfect diagonal symmetry in studies! Aatos Fred helped often other composers as an efficient cook-finder in pre-computer days.
On the same page we note the passing away of Jan Mortensen, Luigi Vitale, Alexander Toger, Gerardus Smits and Roger Colas.
Many years have passed since Finland participated in a composing match with another nation. Now we can proudly announce the match between Switzerland and Finland in three sections, pp. 92-93.
The traditional Summer Composing Tourney for problems showing tempo move(s) is announced on p. 93. The theme example by Herbert Hultberg is a delightful presentation of this idea in solution and two tries.
The Spring Meeting of ST took place in April, with a program including a solving competition set by Henry Tanner, lectures, discussions, quick composing competition etc. It was no surprise to see Pauli Perkonoja win the solving competition, but even he made a small mistake in a difficult study, see p. 95.
In his series of The Hard Nut To Crack Neal Turner presents a h#3 from the solving contest in the Spring Meeting, p. 95.
A lightweight solving competition for not-so-experienced solvers was organised in Helsinki in the end of April. The problems and solutions are on pp. 96-97.
In the previous issue, Kari Valtonen presented successful Finnish two- and threemovers. Now it is time to check what our composers have lately achieved in the field of more-movers, pp. 98-100. In the last two decades we have not had too much success in this field. Problem II, 7# by Henry Tanner has been included in the FIDE Album and the previous Finnish moremover in the Album was by Harri Hurme in the Album 1983-1985! Obviously we would like to change this trend, but it is not easy...
The 2#- and 3#-round from the Polish Solving Championship are on p. 101, with solutions in the end of the originals column.
The Selected Helpmates by Marko Ylijoki deals with lightweight helpmates. The genre is rather well researched, but there are still many interesting discoveries to be made.
ST 4-5/2003 is due to appear in Autumn.
Published 15th July l 2003