Season 8 stage 2 after 6 rounds

The stage 2 crosstable after 6 rounds looks like this:

After half of the first RR over, the highest ranked engines Stockfish, Komodo and Houdini can be found in the top half of the table. Nirvana is surprising in third place, but with so many games left anything can happen. The draw rate so far is 69%, and this will make the fight for qualifying very close and tense. Time will tell as always.


Komodo got its first wins in the rounds 4-6. The first was an easy win against The Baron. The second win was against Houdini in one of the highlights of this stage.

There have been several annoying long draws. Gull - Ginkgo, The Baron - Ginkgo, Fire - Komodo, Hannibal - Texel are examples from rounds 4-6. The game is over after 30-40 moves, both engines start shuffling pieces but at least one can't let go of some technical eval advantage that isn't moving and isn't expected to change. And when the 50-move draw gets near an engine decides it is better to move a pawn and lose some of the advantage than to end the game. ANNOYING. Only thing to do is stop watching for a few hours until they go away and a new game starts.

Nirvana - Texel looked like one of these boring long draws, but it suddenly changed after 160 moves. It's not clear whether Texel blundered, was it time pressure or could Nirvana have won a lot earlier if it had the guts to sacrifice a knight before.

Protector built an eval advantage of 1.8 over Houdini but could not turn the advantage into a win.


Stockfish - Hannibal reached a 7-piece endgame which was a tablebase draw. Hannibal didn't blunder (unlike Houdini in the game in stage 1b) and held the draw.

Notable game
Stockfish - Gull, round 6
Game on TCEC archive

After 32 moves the position was:

Both engines saw the game was heading for a draw, but Stockfish decided at least it wouldn't be boring. It started with clearing the queen side, trading 3 pieces for the black queen in the process.

The king side was open for Gull's attacking, and white traded a further rook for one of the bishops to break the attack.

This wasn't a desperate idea since white regained the rook immediately with this beautiful double rook fork by the queen

The game soon ended with a perpetual check by black. Now that is a fighting draw.