Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Season 15 division 3 live blog, Tuesday Mar 19th

Division 3 is being played, currently in the third RR out of 4. This is a very close division, only 1.5 points seperate 1st and 7th places after 18 rounds. All the engines have won and lost at least twice already and anything can happen.

We join the Arasan - AllieStein game at the start of round 19. These two engines are the current joint leaders with a +2 score.

move 12: The opening is a Petrov, on move 7 AllieStein chose a sideline that was played by Kasparov and Karpov in the 1980s. Its eval jumped over 1.5, perhaps related to the known "castling bug" as Arasan castled right before that. After a few exchanges AllieStein's eval came back down. On move 12 queens were exchanged, this could be a short draw.

move 19: more exchanges and only RRN vs RRB remain on move 17. Evals are close to 0, black's pawn structure seems slightly worse but I doubt it matters. This will be a draw unless one of the engines blunders badly.

move 28: Arasan offered a pawn to exchange the knight and bishop, AllieStein refused. The white knight then blocked both black rooks on the back rank. The center pawns were isolated and were removed. Evals climbed over 0.3 for a while, though I don't see any real advantage for white.

move 41: AllieStein pushed pawns on the king side, evals came down to 0. Arasan was expecting a rook trade, AllieStein had another plan and its eval became negative. Arasan pushed a pawn on the queen side, AllieStein didn't take to keep its king safe from checks. The engines traded pawns on both sides, AllieStein went a pawn up but its king was exposed.

move 51: Arasan wants to finish the game with a repetition, AllieStein keeps playing. The engines exchanged down to a rook ending and reached a tablebase draw.

Nothing really happened in this game, both Arasan and AllieStein continue to lead the table but now the other engines have a chance to get closer to the top with a win.

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