Laser and Fritz lead the rest of the engines by 2.5 points and are the obvious candidates for promotion to division 2. Fritz has not lost a game yet, Laser lost two but won the reverse games so it is at least drawn against all the engines.
At the bottom of the table Ethereal and ChessBrain are 1.5 points below their closest rival and are facing relegation. ChessBrain has lost two games on time, I'm not sure whether these losses count as crashes. It was losing these games in any case. On the other hand there is no doubt about Pedone crashing once, and since it took a strike for a bug fix between divisions it is one crash away from being disqualified and automatically relegated.
There have been 7 2-move start positions so far, 8 games for each book sequence. In rounds 1 and 8 there were 8 Nimzowitsch-Larsen openings, 5 of which were black wins which is quite unusual. The games in rounds 7 and 14 were all Sicilian Alapin openings, all 8 were draws.
After a quick glance at the games there is one unusual event that is worth mentioning. In the round 13 game Ethereal vs Nemorino the engines got into a long shuffle in a RB vs Q position. Nemorino had a solid eval advantage close to 3 but Ethereal had a clear fortress and the game was heading for a draw. Nemorino avoided a 50-move draw and the shuffle continued, until on move 145 Nemorino simply sacrificed its queen, leading to a quick loss of the game. Nemorino's PV showed it immediately loses the queen, yet its eval was 1.34 in its favor. What a strange bug, similar to the c7f7 game of last season.
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