Frequently Asked Questions

No. You can play anonymously without creating an account. Game history is preserved for 30 days while your session is active. Create a free account to permanently save your history and play across devices.

MyChessBot is powered by Stockfish, the world-class open-source chess engine, running on our servers. Your moves are sent to the server, the engine calculates a bot response calibrated to that bot's personality and rating, and the move is returned. Your game moves are saved to our database (30 days for guest sessions, indefinitely for registered accounts) so you can review and resume games later.

Yes. When you start a game and pick a side, you can choose the opening repertoire the bot will try to play. The bot will follow that opening for the first several moves before transitioning to engine-driven play.

An opening is a set of known lines that depend on both players' moves, not a fixed script — so the bot follows the opening's theory while the game stays in those known lines, then plays its own best moves at its rating. Most often it's your moves that steer it out: openings branch on what you play, so an offbeat or less-common reply can take the position out of known theory — set your opponent to the London System and answer with a Caro-Kann-style setup, and it plays its London moves while your play stays familiar, then improvises once you steer into a rarer structure. Some openings also need you to cooperate: ask the bot for the Caro-Kann, a defense to 1.e4, while you open with 1.d4, and there is simply no Caro-Kann to play. The bot also won't make a bad move just to stay on theme — if continuing the opening would hang a piece or walk into a tactic, it plays a sound move instead. And lower-rated bots leave the opening sooner by design, like a real player at that level with less theory memorized, while higher-rated bots and more mainstream lines stay in book longer.

Master Max is the strongest bot at 2000 Elo — near-master strength. Every bot, including the 2000-rated ones, is free to play on all plans.

Your rating is your win/draw/loss record against bots of known Elo, updated after every finished game using Glicko-2 — the same system Lichess and FIDE-Online use. It tightens as you play, and shows as "provisional" until it has enough games to be confident. Your move quality from game reviews is shown separately as coaching — what your play looks like versus how you actually score — but it does not change the rating itself.

It is a rough estimate of your strength for that one game, based on how closely your moves matched the engine's best choices in win-percentage terms — so it accounts for whether the position was balanced or already decided (a 200-centipawn slip when you're crushing is much milder than the same slip at equality). Moves played within known opening theory do not count toward the score. Treat any single game's number as approximate (±200 Elo is plausible). The trend across many reviewed games is the better signal of your real strength.

The rating is stabilized against single-game noise on purpose. The outcome component shifts more for upsets — beating a much higher-rated bot moves it more than beating one near your level. The review-derived component is shrunk toward your existing rating for short games, so a 12-move scuffle barely moves the number while a full 60-move game moves it meaningfully. A one-off bad game should not undo months of consistent play.

Not directly. Different sites use different engines, search depths, and rating methodologies. Chess.com's accuracy uses a proprietary algorithm called CAPS2, and Lichess does not publish a per-game Elo estimate at all. The rating shown here is best read as a relative measure within MyChessBot — useful for tracking your own progress over time, but not an absolute rating you can paste into another site's profile.

Yes. Free accounts get a few full engine reviews every week — each one labels every move (best, good, inaccuracy, mistake, blunder), shows an evaluation bar, and draws the engine's preferred move on the board next to what you played. There is also a "Review & Improve" mode that replays the turning points of your game and asks you to find the better move yourself — active recall on your own mistakes, the highest-value training rep in chess. Standard and Premium add unlimited reviews.

It reads your own reviewed games. Recurring mistakes are mined from them and ranked by how much they cost you, then turned into a personalized plan. The plan is spaced-repetition based and scheduled per pattern, not per puzzle — when a weakness comes due you get a fresh position of that type, so you train retrieval rather than memorizing one puzzle. Difficulty self-tunes toward roughly 85% success (the band where learning is fastest), and the plan is rating-band aware: a 900 and an 1800 get structurally different curricula that can mix tactics, guess-the-move on your own games, banded endgames, and a composure habit. Your Skill Profile, which ranks more than a dozen parts of your game against players at your level — overall move quality plus breakouts by phase, by situation (converting wins, defending losses, sharp positions), and composure — decides which weakness gets prioritized.

We are honest about this where most products are not: puzzle-to-real-game transfer is not well established in the research, so rather than promise a number, we measure it on you. For each pattern you train, we track its mistake rate in your real games over time and compare it against your untrained patterns as a within-you control. If your fork mistakes drop while your untrained patterns stay flat, that is a real signal the training is working; if it is just noise, we say "no clear change yet." It is a falsifiable claim about your own improvement, not a marketing slogan.

Premium ($11.99/month, or $119.9/year) includes everything in Standard — your Skill Profile and unlimited game reviews — plus the personalized coaching plan with transfer-measurement proof, every cosmetic unlocked, 12 advanced openings, and limited support for connecting electronic chess boards (Square Off / MIKO), currently in Beta. Every bot is free to play on all plans.

Yes. Both paid tiers can be billed monthly or annually — annual is 2 months free versus paying month to month. Standard is $4.99/month or $49.9/year; Premium is $11.99/month or $119.9/year. Pick monthly or annual with the toggle on the pricing page; the same 7-day free trial applies either way, and you can switch billing period later from your billing page.

Yes, with limited support — physical-board integration is currently a Beta feature. Square Off boards — Grand Kingdom, Neo, Neo Z, GKS-X, NB, Pro, and Swap — connect over Bluetooth and let you play any bot on the site with real pieces. The Grand Kingdom is the only model verified end-to-end on real hardware. The others are built from the manufacturer’s protocol spec but not yet hardware-tested, so treat them as "should work, may surprise you." Physical-board integration is a Premium feature and needs a Chromium-based browser (Chrome, Edge, or Opera).

Yes. Square Off rebranded as MIKO, and newer units sold under the MIKO name — for example, the MIKO Chess Grand — use the same Bluetooth protocol as their Square Off equivalents. Pick the matching Square Off model under Account → Physical Board when you set up. Premium tier required.

Square Off and MIKO boards: Grand Kingdom, Neo, Neo Z, GKS-X, NB, Pro, and Swap. They all connect via Bluetooth. DGT and other manufacturers aren’t supported. The Grand Kingdom is the only model verified on real hardware; the others ride on the manufacturer’s protocol spec and should work, but haven’t been hardware-tested yet. Online play against opponents on Lichess or Chess.com via the physical board isn’t supported today — if there’s enough demand a Lichess integration is on the table.

Subscribe to Premium, then go to Account → Physical Board and turn the integration on. Pick your board model, pair it once via the browser’s Bluetooth chooser, and the "Connect" option will appear on the game-setup screen for each new game. Requires Chrome, Edge, or Opera on Windows, macOS, Linux, or Android. Web Bluetooth isn’t available on Safari or Firefox.

Yes, anytime. Visit your Account page and click "Manage Subscription" to cancel. You'll keep access to your tier until the end of your current billing period.

Your game history is saved to our servers even without an account, but only while your guest session cookie is active (up to 30 days). If the cookie expires or you switch devices, the history won't be accessible. Create a free account to permanently preserve your history and sync it across devices.

MyChessBot runs in any modern browser on desktop, tablet, or mobile — Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge are all supported. You can also install it as a Progressive Web App (PWA) for an app-like experience.

Yes. All payments are processed by Stripe, a PCI-compliant payment processor used by millions of businesses worldwide. We never see or store your card details.