The premier computer chess championship TCEC is Starting this May 1st with the strongest ever field – 12 engines over 3100 ELO and a total of 32 participants. Live games will be available at the official site of the competition starting at 13:00 CET.

The engines are divided in two groups aka Preliminaries – Stage 1A and Stage 1B. Each of the groups is headed by Season 8 Superfinal participants – the Grand Champion Komodo and Silver medalist Stockfish. The drawing of lots for the other engines is based on tentative Rating from the CCRL list and where needed other rating lists. Starting from the Qualifiers (Stage 2) and going into the Candidates (Stage 3) and the Superfinal, “TCEC rating list” will be used. This is also valid for Season 10, right from the start.

See the participants in the two groups here

Here are the exact versions of Stage 1a that starts today. A total of 8 engines will qualify and the battle for these positions is expected to be very heated. Thus, each of the engines comes with its own special “TCEC” update.

1. Komodo 9.42
2. Houdini 4
3. Gull 3
4. Rybka 4.1
5. Texel 1.06a45
6. Protector 1.9
7. Ginkgo 1.7
8. Raptor 2.2
9. Hannibal 220416
10. Bobcat 7.6
11. Fizbo 1.7
12. Hakkapeliitta 210416
13. Laser 1.1
14. DisasterArea 1.63
15. Fridolin 2
16. Myrddin 0.87

Official website of the competition will be http://tcec.chessdom.com/, the sponsors of the event are Chessdom.com and ChessArena.com. Official facebook page is http://www.facebook.com/tcec.chess