Season 8 group 1a after two rounds

Two rounds are already over, at a rate of about one round a day. Here is the scoreboard so far:

It's too early to think about qualifiers, Arasan and Gaviota with a better that expected result, while Protector and Jonny are diappointing so far. The openings have been diverse, and the draw rate so far is 50% with black winning 33% and white winning 17%. Letting the engines play from the first move is working well.

Jonny made a joke on move 1 of its game against Komodo. It started 1. e4, and evaluated this at 0.49! Komodo didn't laugh too much, it gradually turned the tables on Jonny, and converted a Q vs RB ending.  In Jonny's second game, black against Texel, after 1. d4 d5 Jonny evaluated 0.57, not so funny this time. I think the evaluation function needs to be examined.

In the Komodo-Gull game two of the favorites of this group met. The game ended in a draw, but there was one interesting event starting at move 35. Suddenly without warning Komodo's evaluation jumped for two moves, as if it saw a win. And then it returned to drawish values. But then Gull's evaluation did the same. According to this effect we can estimate that Komodo sees about two moves farther than Gull.

Notable game
Of the games I followed in these rounds the one I enjoyed the most was the Gaviota - Protector game.
Game on TCEC archive

Gaviota the underdog maintained a small positive score, and when it saw its chance it launched a furious pawn attack against black's king, here after move 30:

Just look at black's miserable bishop. With black's king stuck in the corner and the queen as its last defender, white launched an attack on the f7 pawn:

A final knight maneuver cracked black's defense for the win. Congratulations to Gaviota and its author Miguel Ballicora, always a welcome participant in the chat room with a lot of insightful commentary.