Season 8 superfinal stats

Draw rate, wins

Final draw rate was 89%, very high but perhaps expected since it is very hard to beat these engines starting from a close to balanced position. The openings Cato chose in games 67-100 were slightly more unbalanced, and their draw rate was only 82.4%.

Moves per game

Average=63.26
Median=55.75

Games were much shorter than I expected. The draws tended to be short where both engines had 0 eval and the TCEC adjudication stopped the game. The median number of moves in the decisive games was 74.5.

Time per game (hours)

Average=5:36
Median=5:27

My prediction for time per game in the superfinal was off by 45 minutes... The short draws were something I didn't think would happen. In the end the games of the superfinal were similar in duration to the games of stage 3, even though each engine had 30 more minutes.

Openings

The first letter of the ECO codes of the superfinal openings was distributed as follows:

More or less even, biased for irregular openings and against open games and Sicillians.

If we use the opening 'family name' (using format FAMILY_NAME: VARIANT....) the top 3 are:

English - 16 times
Sicillian - 12 times
QGD - 8 times


Reverse pairs, wins

As much as Cato tried to choose biased openings, the engines still found ways to draw. Still, excellent choices by Cato since there were no biased 1-1 results.


Reverse pairs, same moves

How many plys did the engines play after book until the first divergence in the reverse games? 

Divergence was usually within the first move (2 plies). This shows that Cato chose openings that didn't have forced continuations so that each engine could try its own strategy. The longest the two engines agreed was 13 plys in games 47-48.