Season 16 has started, new league format

TCEC season 16 has started yesterday, after a slightly longer than usual 6-week break that included testing and bonus events. The new season comes with format changes which I will describe briefly, the full details can be found on chessdom.

The changes affect the lower divisions, the premier division and superfinal do not change. In the last few seasons there were 3 divisions with 8 engines each and 2 promotions/relegations between divisions. There was also a preliminary division 4 which had a variable size, increasing from season to season. Last season division 4 was played in two parts 4a and 4b with a playoff that determined the 2 engines promoting to division 3. In the new format there are two leagues with 16 engines and a preliminary qualification league of variable size. There will be 6 engines promoting to league 2 from qualification, and 4 engines promoting from league 2 to league 1. The engines that were supposed to play in divisions 1-3 were places in the new leagues 1-2, and the engines that played in division 4 were placed in the qualification league, together with several new entries.

The engines playing in the qualification league are: Winter, Rodent, The Baron, Tucano, Cheese, Minic, Topple, Igel, Wasp, Marvin, chess22k, ScorpioNN, Jumbo, Bagatur, Stoofvlees, ChessFighterNN and Asymptote. The last 3 are new entries, two are new NN engines and one "classical" AB. Also playing in the qualification league is LCZeroCPU, a version of Leela with a small net that runs on the CPU server without using GPUs. This is only for testing and entertainment, its results will be nullified at the end of the league and it cannot promote nor affect the results of the other engines.

There will be 306 games in the qualification league, this will take about two weeks at a rate of a little more than an  hour per game. Leagues 1-2 will be similar, the games in league 1 will be longer at about 100 minutes per game. I will not cover these leagues very closely, I may have a few live sessions if I have the time. I hope that when the premier division starts around the end of August I will have more time to increase coverage and to post more detailed reports.