*Only engines that are SMP capable with minimum 8 core support are participating.
*Engine updates are not allowed during a Season.
*The time control has been reduced from 150' + 60" to 120' + 30".
*6-men Nalimov has been removed since several engines have shown some strange behavior during the testing.
*The GUI will now adjudicate tablebase positions.
*The win/loss adjudication rule has been extended to 4 moves instead of 3. Still +/- 6.50 pawns.
*Stage 2a/2b has been merged into Stage 2, which is a single round robin.
*All openings will now be from recent human high rated tournaments to reflect the format of each Stage and there will not be any computer analysis of these positions, except to remove duplicates.
*The length of the openings have been reduced from 8 moves to 6 moves.

In addition, there have been some changes to the website etc:
*All games playing will be shown at http://tcec.chessdom.com/
*The chess board now has coordinates.
*The engines will now show distance to mate instead of very high evals.
*The chat has been moved to the top menu (will open in a new window).
*The widescreen option has been removed.

nTCEC Season 2 starts August 26th.

The list of participants is still not finalized, and will be published as soon as possible.