04 May 2020

TCEC S17 Opening Pairs

Last week's post, Leela Beat Stockfish in TCEC S17 & CCC13 Finals, gave the W-L-D score for the TCEC S17 half of the post:-

LCZero beat Stockfish with an S17 final score of +17-12=71 (52.5-47.5).

Given that the TCEC organizers force their preferred openings in every pair of games for a final, I wondered how the various openings fared. I downloaded the PGN for the 100 games in the match, processed them through a few filters and loaded the PGN headers into a database.

For all 50 opening pairs, the chart on the left shows how they fared. The column 'LWhite' shows the result when Leela had White, 'SWhite' when Stockfish had White.

The first row says that there were seven openings when both engines won as White. The second row says Leela won eight games as White when Stockfish could only draw as White in the same opening.

Leela won one opening as both White and Black. That happened in games 95 and 96, where the forced opening was 1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5 3.e5 b6. On its first free move, Stockfish played 4.c3; Leela played 4.h4, starting one of its signature plans: the advance of a side Pawn into enemy territory.

For the other opening pairs, I tried to find the PGN in the TCEC wiki, TCEC Season 17 (wiki.chessdom.org), but failed. I finally found it at TCEC 17 superfinal opening PGN available (blogchess2016.blogspot.com), but it was too late to add the file to my database for this post. I'll try to do that some other time.

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