FRC qualifier

[lkaufman]

Today the quarter and semifinal matches for the 1st chess.com qualifier spot took place. All the 8 players were pretty strong grandmasters, having qualified from a strong Swiss the day before. The time limit today was 15 minutes plus 2 seconds, well within the Rapid range. Remarkably, out of 13 games, only one ended in a draw, and even in that game White was winning in the latter part of the game. Moreover, according to Stockfish 15, there were only two games where one player wasn't ahead by at least 1.00 by move ten, and this is not due to the initial positions, where White's edge generally was below 0.5. At least in one game both sides were ahead by this amount before move ten, at different times! Almost always, one side was pretty clearly winning somewhere before move 20. This wasn't generally due to simple blunders, the positions were just very complicated and difficult. So I would say this was a very strong argument for the viability of chess960 (FRC) for top human play. We know that it also works well for engines playing blitz on one thread, but with long time controls and many threads the top engines draw nearly every game with each other, so FRC doesn't solve the problem for correspondence play. But it sure does make a huge difference compared to unrestricted standard play.