The key stages of the Top Chess Engine Championship are now live at the official website of the competition. The Premier Division kicked off with a game between the current Grand Champion Stockfish and the newcomer to the division Ethereal (replay the game here).
Format of the Premier Division
This year the Premier Division has increased the number of participants from 8 to 10. The goal of the increase is to reflect the current state of the computer chess software strength, while providing a more dynamic and exciting race towards the finals.
The Premier division is a 2xDRR competition with time control 90 mins + 10 sec Due to the hardware setup of the Premier Division, the games will not follow the standard flow of a competition. First, the audience will see all games that require CPU only. Then, the bulk of games that require GPU will be played.
The top 2 engines promote to the Superfinal which will be the traditional 100 games head to head clash.
Premier Division participants
Stockfish – updated to 202003092246
AllieStein – updated to v0.6_8158ed5-n14.0
LCZero – updated to v0.24-sv-t60-3010
Komodo – updated to 2503.05
Stoofvlees II – updated to a14
Houdini – not updated: running 6.03 – 64 threads on WINE
Fire – no longer under development
Komodo MCTS – updated to 2503.05
ScorpioNN – updated to 3.0.7.1
Ethereal – updated to 12.01