Top Chess Engine Championship

Top Chess Engine Championship formerly known as Thoresen Chess Engines Competition (TCEC or nTCEC) is a computer chess tournament that was organized, directed, and hosted by Martin Thoresen until the end of Season 6; from Season 7 onward it has been organized by Chessdom. It is often regarded as the Unofficial World Computer Chess Championship because of its strong participant line-up and long time control matches on high-end hardware, giving rise to very high-class chess.

The first TCEC season was held in 2010. After a short break in 2012, TCEC was restarted in early 2013 (as nTCEC) and is currently active (renamed as TCEC in early 2014) with all-day live broadcasts of chess matches on its website. Supported by original engine authors and based on voluntarism and donation, it caused a furor in February 2011, when the free version of Houdini defeated reigning computer chess champion Rybka in a 40-game match.

The "current" season of TCEC (Season 5) is sponsored by Chessdom Arena. The current TCEC champion is , which defeated Houdini 6.03 in the TCEC Season 11 Superfinal 100-game match held in March – April 2018.

The TCEC competition is divided into Seasons, where each Season happens over a course of a few months, with matches played round-the-clock and broadcast live over the internet. Each season is divided into four qualifying stages and one Superfinal, where the top two chess engines battle it out over a series of 100 games to win the title of TCEC Grand Champion.

pondering is set to off. All engines run on the same hardware and use the same opening book, which is taken from recent strong human Grandmaster tournaments, truncated to the first 6 or 8 moves, and changed in every stage. Large pages are disabled but access to various endgame tablebases is permitted. Engines are allowed updates between stages; if there is a critical play-limiting bug, they are also allowed to be updated once during the stage. TCEC generates its own elo rating list from the matches played during the tournament. An initial rating is given to any new participant based on its rating in other chess engine rating lists.

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