TCEC 26 superfinal book: 50 chess classics

The TCEC 26 superfinal book was made by Jeroen Noomen in cooperation with Windfishballad. It will be a continuation of the trend I started in season 25: the selected 50 opening lines are from famous Grandmasters of the past. In the list below you can see which famous grandmaster features in which line. The TCEC 26 superfinal will be a kind of tribute to ex-worldchampion Mikhail Tal: 18 of the lines were taken from Tal's games.

In the TCEC 25 superfinal it became clear to me that my usual method wasn't working anymore. Around half of the lines gave a much higher or much lower exit than I anticipated, which made me conclude that it is impossible on my own hardware to estimate the book exit correctly. Hence I asked for help and Windfishballad kindly helped me to analyse several hundredths of chess classics on his very fast hardware, using Stockfish and Leela Chess Zero. From these lines I selected the ones that had the best exits, or the most interesting main lines, or where there was a big difference in exit evaluation, or where engines diverged quite quickly, or a combination of these factors.

Average length of the lines is 8.5 moves, which is slightly lower than the S25 superfinal book, but still quite high. Including chess classics comes with a small price, i.e. lines are longer. As usual the great majority of the lines have a very high bias.

Exits: 43 lines have a Stockfish exit evaluation between +0.82 and +1.01. 1 line is below +0.82 and 7 lines are above +1.01. Thus we have a nice mix of different exits. Note: this are the exits on Windfishballad's machine, the real exits in TCEC might be different due to a different Stockfish version, longer or shorter thinking time, contempt etc. 

Black advantage: there are four lines that start with a black advantage, increasing the chance of a black win.

Higher/lower book exits: the lines were randomly put into the book, but in general a lower exit will be followed by a higher exit.

ECO code distribution

ECO A: 12 lines

ECO B: 14 lines

ECO C: 9 lines

ECO D: 7 lines

ECO E: 8 lines

Move length distribution

3 moves: 1 line

4 moves: 1 line

5 moves: 4 lines

6 moves: 4 lines

7 moves: 9 lines

8 moves: 8 lines

9 moves: 3 lines

10 moves: 9 lines
11 moves: 4 lines

12 moves: 5 lines
> 12 moves: 2 lines

Featured player(s) in line:
1 Tal
2 Tal, Fischer
3 Tal
4 Botvinnik
5 Tal
6 Fischer
7 Anderssen
8 Fischer
9 Tal
10 Karpov, Anand
11 Tal
12 Tal
13 Lasker
14 Anderssen
15 Botvinnik
16 Tartakower
17 Korchnoi, Tal
18 Botvinnik
19 Alekhine, Euwe
20 Kasparov
21 Alekhine, Euwe
22 Tal
23 Kasparov
24 Tal
25 Alekhine
26 Anderssen
27 Fischer
28 Tal
29 Botvinnik
30 Tal
31 Alekhine, Nimzowitsch
32 Botvinnik, Keres
33 Spassky
34 Morphy
35 Botvinnik
36 Botvinnik
37 Tal
38 Karpov
39 Alekhine, Euwe
40 Tal
41 Karpov
42 Anand
43 Tartakower
44 Botvinnik
45 Tal
46 Tal
47 Tal
48 Tartakower, Nimzowitsch
49 Tal
50 Karpov