TCEC Cup 7

The TCEC Cup 7 knockout event was the penultimate event of TCEC Season 19, begun on October 31st 2020 with the usual brisk Rapid tempo of 30′+5′′/move. It involved 32 of the top 35 engines of the TCEC19 championship as FIRE, VAJOLET and CHIRON sat this one out, see Fig. 1. It used the rules of TCEC Cup 6 (Haworth and Hernandez, 2020a-2020d). Matches were ‘best of four’ and tie-breaks consisted of further ‘same opening’ mini-matches of two games. For the second time, the ‘equal distance’ pairing was used, with seed s playing seed s+25−r (rather than 26−r−s+1) in round r if the wins all went to the higher seed. Thus, seed s1 plays s17, s9, . . . , s2 if all survive long enough. The higher seed is listed first in Table 1. This pairing also adheres to the Postponement Principle of keeping top seeds apart but stiffens the competition for the top quarter of the seeds and reduces the likelihood of protracting matches far into a tie-break – at least, in the early rounds. Seed s is of course not sentient here and therefore not in a position to wish it was seed s+1.