Strongest Chess Engines Play Out Tense Positions From Candidates In CCC

The candidates are well under way, drawing the interest and attention of chess enthusiasts all over the world. This penultimate event, leading into the next World Chess Championship, is a highlight for all chess players. 

!! Watch the CCC Candidates 2024 Playouts Event Here !!

We've selected 50 games from the 2024 Candidates and 2024 Women's Candidates, which will be played out from various positions by our favorite engines. For viewers that are new to the engine space, modern chess engines are so powerful that you cannot allow them to play games from the initial position, otherwise they will draw every game. To fix this, we give the engines a preset opening line to play. Typically these lines have an advantage large enough to permit chances at a victory, without guaranteeing it. The engines then take turns playing both sides of the line. We've picked the first point from our 50 Candidates games in which there is a large advantage for one side.

These events will give us a chance to see how top-notch super-human entities might have carried out the games. It will give us a chance to see potential missed wins by your favorite players. It will give us a chance to see bungled defenses that could have been broken through.

Initially, we will be playing three sets of events, at the 5+5 time control. The engines playing will be Stockfish (An open-source giant, universally regarded as the strongest engine), Torch (Chess.com's new engine, which has repeatedly beaten all other contenders at CCC across various time controls), and Leela Chess Zero (An open-source implementation and continuation of the work started by DeepMind's AlphaZero). 

• Event 1: Stockfish vs Torch
• Event 2: Stockfish vs Leela Chess Zero
• Event 3: Torch vs Leela Chess Zero

Below is a helpful guide, which lets you take a game # at CCC, and find the original game from which the position was derived. For example, the first two games played in each event, (Game #1 and Game #2), will be from the Round 1 game between Fabiano Caruana and Hikaru Nakamura. A link to the full game can be seen as well.

You can also view the Library found here, which shows the PGNs of all the selected games, up until the initial point the engines are playing from.