Season 9 is approaching, May 2016

TCEC season 9 is starting soon!!

After a 5 month break Chessdom have indicated that season 9 will start on May 1st 2016, less than two weeks away. From the information released so far this season will feature:

- up to 32 engines (28 confirmed)
- several new engines, some of which are strong (over 3000 ELO)
- a long season, 7 months long
- 15 second increments

If there are better engines this season, will there be a struggle for top places? In season 8 Gull was strong enough to challenge Komodo and Stockfish in stage 3, will there be others this season? Houdini is also being developed again after a long time, can it catch up with the leaders and return to the top as it was a few seasons ago?

Seven months is really long, almost twice as long as all the seasons I've watched so far (see table below). I really hope I can keep watching the games without too much disruption to my life.

• Season 4: 32 engines, 364 games, 108 days
• Season 5: 36 engines, 525 games, 98 days
• Season 6: 36 engines, 590 games, 115 days
• Season 7: 28 engines, 521 games, 100 days
• Season 8: 24 engines, 454 games, 102 days
• Season 9: 32 engines, 804 games, 215 days (planned)

 
Remember Stockfish's losses on time last season? I hope the developers fixed it this time, the increment is going to be only 15 seconds this time.

As in last season, I intend to post a statistics report after each stage is over. These are based on the PGN files in the TCEC archive. Have a look at my season 8 posts to see what I compute, nothing too fancy. If there is an analysis you would like to see, post a comment below. If I think it's interesting and not too difficult I will add it to the report.

Go TCEC!!