Season 8 group 1b after 3 rounds

It's been a busy week and I didn't follow all the action in the 1b group very closely, these are my impressions so far.

Group 1b standings after 3 rounds:

Unfortunately the issue that was in focus in the first rounds was the crashes. There were too many of these, especially in contrast to the 1a group.

In the Pedone - Alfil, Alfil replied immediately from book, and Pedone crashed on move 2. Since books are not allowed Alfil was disqualified and Crafty replaced it - that's why you don't see Alfil in the table. However, when the game was replayed with Crafty, Pedone crashed on move 7. Pedone's troubles continued when it crashed against Stockfish in round 2, on move 9 this time. After limiting the number of threads and hash size it managed to complete a game in round 3, hopefully stable enough to play now.

Junior is also causing problems with 2 crashes against Houdini and Nirvana in the first three rounds. Martin wrote in the chat that he was certain that this version of Junior wasn't stable enough and recommended using a prior version, but he was overruled (developers? viewers? someone insisted on the new version).

Stockfish with 3 wins out of 3 (one was a crash), it seems to be back after a problematic season 7. Still early though, and the opponents are too weak for a real assessment.

Chiron - Nirvana was a miniature, ending in 3-fold repetition after 11 moves.

Notable game
Hannibal - Junior, round 1
Game on TCEC archive

Junior's 6th move allowed Hannibal to advance to e5 attacking a knight:

This led to an exchange of knights and the opening of the king side:

Black is a pawn up temporarily, but has no development on the queen side and its king pawns are undefended. Junior tried to attack the white king, forcing it to advance. The king soon found a safe spot, allowing Hannibal to eliminate all of black's king side pawns.

White now was a pawn up and had two passed pawns, black still had development problems on the queen's side. The queens were exchanged next, and white gained another pawn. The rest of the game was a straightforward case of exchanging pieces until the advantage is converted to a win. Well done Hannibal !