Komodo won the last two seasons (7 and 8) of the Top Chess Engine Championship (TCEC), but for this season's super-final it's on the outside looking in. Stockfish finished with 39/56 in stage 3, going undefeated, winning every mini-match against the other seven engines, and coming in first by a healthy three and a half points. It went 5-3 against a development version of Houdini, 4.5-3.5 against Komodo 10.1, 5.5-2.5 against Fire 5 and 6-2 against the four remaining engines: Andscacs 0.872b, Jonny 8, Gull 3, and the ancient Rybka 4.1.
Houdini lost to no other engine and also went +1 against Komodo, finishing with 35.5, a point ahead of Komodo, which also lost a game - surprisingly - to Andscacs, an engine which it otherwise thrashed. Fire came in a distant fourth with 28.5 points, and after that it was another 5 points down to the next engine.
Stockfish will thus take on Houdini in the super-final, but first - in what looks like a gigantic favor to Robert Houdart, Houdini's programmer - there will be a break for all 32 engines participating in season 9 to play a double round-robin rapid tournament, something which was only decided about a week ago. Only 992 games, and then we'll see if Houdart's for-purchase program will surpass the free, open-source Stockfish.