CCCC starts.

Chess.com Computer Chess Championship starts today.

24 engines will participate playing all against all twice, in a double Round Robin tournament with 15 minutes for each player for the game plus 5 seconds per move increment and pondering(thinking in opponent’s time) on. There will be no opening books usage for the 1st round. Every engine will calculate all the moves by itself.
Leela will play on four Tesla V100 GPUs while the other engines on 46 threads of a 2 x Intel Xeon Platinum 8168, 2.70 GHz that has 48 logical cores and 96 threads.

The hardware is very fast, the engines belong to the top ones so the level of play will be amazing.
Every engine will play 46 games so there would be 46 rounds.
After all games are completed, the first 8 of the 24 engines will advance to round 2.

Leela will compete with Lc0 cuda version, with 11089 net and with no tablebases usage.

The first game will start at 17:00 UTC and Leela’s first game will be around September 1st, 00:00 UTC.
After that she should play around 08:00 UTC and around 16:00 UTC. This should keep for most games but not all.

Leela follows Nirvana’s schedule so with every opponent Nirvana is playing in a round, in the next one Leela will play that opponent. Except when Leela and Nirvana meet.

The schedule of the first 3 rounds is:

ROUND 1

1 Andscacs vs Xiphos
2 Wasp vs Arasan
3 Booot vs Vajolet
4 Texel vs Crafty
5 Ethereal vs Stockfish
6 Shredder vs Fire
7 Fizbo vs Senpai
8 Pedone vs Fritz
9 Gull vs Nirvana
10 Nemorino vs Houdini
11 Ivanhoe vs Lco
12 Laser vs Komodo

ROUND 2

13 Wasp vs Andscacs
14 Vajolet vs Xiphos
15 Arasan vs Texel
16 Stockfish vs Booot
17 Crafty vs Shredder
18 Senpai vs Ethereal
19 Fire vs Pedone
20 Nirvana vs Fizbo
21 Fritz vs Nemorino
22 Lco vs Gull
23 Houdini vs Laser
24 Komodo vs Ivanhoe

ROUND 3

25 Andscacs vs Vajolet
26 Texel vs Wasp
27 Xiphos vs Stockfish
28 Shredder vs Arasan
29 Booot vs Senpai
30 Pedone vs Crafty
31 Ethereal vs Nirvana
32 Nemorino vs Fire
33 Fizbo vs Lco
34 Laser vs Fritz
35 Gull vs Komodo
36 Ivanhoe vs Houdini

Yesterday there were some test games on CCCC and Leela had a rather good performance without losing games against Xiphos, Texel, Wasp and Crafty. Here is one of the games against Wasp which was impressive:

[Event “CCCC 1: Rapid Rumble (15|5) Testing”] [Site “Chess.com”] [Date “2018.08.30”] [Round “?”] [White “Lc0 17.11089”] [Black “Wasp 3.25”] [Result “1-0”] [ECO “D38”] [WhiteElo “3300”] [BlackElo “3041”] [Annotator “Ts,George”] [PlyCount “135”] [EventDate “2018.??.??”] [EventType “rapid”] [TimeControl “60+5”] 1. d4 Nf6 {Trying to play Nf6 against 1.d4 of Leela practice says it’s always not that good idea.} 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 d5 4. Nc3 Bb4 5. Bg5 O-O 6. e3 h6 7. Bxf6 Bxc3+ 8. bxc3 Qxf6 9. g4 $1 {A classical Leela move! With black’s underdeveloped pieces she grabs the chance to attack.} Qe7 10. h4 Nc6 11. g5 h5 12. Bg2 Qa3 13. O-O Qxc3 14. Rc1 Qa5 {4 out of black’s 6 moves was a Queen move and now she is placed far away from her King’s defence. You can’t really afford to play like this against Leela.} 15. g6 $1 {Does not give time to black for g6 closing the position.} fxg6 16. Qc2 Rf5 17. Ng5 Bd7 18. cxd5 exd5 19. Qb3 b6 20. Be4 Nxd4 $5 {Interesting idea even though it can’t hold.} (20… Raf8 {Trying to give material for stopping the attack doesn’t work.} 21. Bxf5 Rxf5 {And now for the cost of the exchange, the attack of white is stalled. White still is much better though.} 22. Rc2 $1 {With multiple plans. E.g Rfc1 with pressure on c-file.}) 21. exd4 Ba4 22. Bxf5 $1 {A Queen sacrifice, even though it’s actually an advantageous trade to much strengthen the position. White gets a Rook and Bishop plus Knight for the lonely Queen of black.} Bxb3 23. Be6+ Kh8 24. axb3 {[%csl Ra5,Gc1,Ge6,Gg5] A horde of pieces against the Queen. Leela is a lot better here.} c5 25. dxc5 bxc5 26. Bxd5 Rf8 27. Rce1 Qd2 28. Bc4 Qd7 29. Re4 Rf5 30. Rfe1 Rxg5+ 31. hxg5 {It’s just easy technique from here.} Kh7 32. R1e3 Qd1+ 33. Kg2 Qd6 34. Re8 Qf4 35. Bg8+ Kh8 36. R3e5 Qg4+ 37. Kf1 Qd1+ 38. Re1 Qd7 39. R1e2 Qh3+ 40. Ke1 Qh1+ 41. Kd2 Qg1 42. Rf8 Qxg5+ 43. f4 Qf6 44. Ree8 Qb2+ 45. Kd3 Qd4+ 46. Ke2 Qb2+ 47. Kf3 Qc3+ 48. Kg2 Qd2+ 49. Kh3 Qc3+ 50. Kh2 Qd2+ 51. Kg3 Qc3+ 52. Kh4 g5+ 53. Kxh5 Qh3+ 54. Kg6 Qh6+ 55. Kf5 Qh3+ 56. Ke5 Qc3+ 57. Kd6 Qd4+ 58. Bd5+ Kh7 59. f5 Qf4+ 60. Kd7 Qxf5+ 61. Rxf5 Kg6 62. Ke6 Kh5 63. Rf1 Kh4 64. Rg1 g4 65. Kf5 g6+ 66. Kf4 g5+ 67. Kf5 a6 68. Rh8# 1-0