TCEC Superfinal starts on March 29

Stockfish to challenge Houdini.

Stockfish, the open source engine by Marco Costalba, Joona Kiiski, Gary Linscott and a huge community of contributors, has convincingly won TCEC Premier Division. Stockfish collected 61,0/84 points to secure the gold medal and the right to challenge the current champion Houdini for the TCEC Grand Champion title.

The Superfinal match of the Top Chess Engine Championship starts this Thursday and you can follow the games live on the official site.

The reigning champion Houdini by Robert Houdart finished clear second with 54,5/84. It had better performance than the winner against Komodo, but a higher draw rate against lower rated engines.

Both Houdini and Stockfish incurred only a one loss during the Premier division. Stockfish lost a game against the bronze medalist Komodo, while Houdini lost a direct match with Stockfish. Scroll down for the full standings.

The Superfinal details:

The TCEC S11 Superfinal will be 100 games match aka x50 double round robin. This match is played with 50 different openings so that each engine plays both black and white of the same position. The match will be presented with opening 1 used in games 1 and 2, then opening 2 used in games 3 and 4 etc. If the match is theoretically won for one side before game 100, the match will still continue until all 100 games have been played. In the case of a drawn match there will be a rapid match of 16 games with a time control of 25′ + 10″ with random openings selected from earlier in the same Season. In case it is still tied there will be a Blitz match of 8 games with a time control of 3′ + 2″.

The winner of the Superfinal will be crowned the TCEC Grand Champion and will keep this title until there is a winner in the next Superfinal. There is no automatic qualification for the reigning Grand Champion, it will have to go all the way through the next Season for it to be able to defend the title.

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