Frequently Asked Questions

Do the bots adjust to different time controls?

Currently the bots only do minor adjustments depending on time control (related to things like likelihood of resigning and similar).

But in terms of playing strength, it not affected by the time control, meaning that a bot will feel a lot stronger in a bullet game.

This is an active choice that we've made, and the reasoning is that we think it's useful for players to have a fixed strength to benchmark against.

In unlimited time control you might achieve 1500 rating, and in blitz you might achieve 1000. Since this is against the same bots, with the same strength, you can quickly see how much the time affects your own strength.

Why do bots play stronger/weaker than their rating suggests?

We do regular rating calibrations, and are currently trying to mimic Lichess blitz ratings as closely as possible. You can read more how it's done in our How Chessiverse Ratings Work article.

That being said, in single games, bots, as well as humans, can both under and overperform. Keep in mind that even with a 400 rating difference, the lower rated player is expected to win almost 10% of the time.

Why do we have so many bots? Isn't it better to focus on a few?

This is a relevant question for sure. There are two considerations here.

It really isn't much harder for us to create one or a hundred bots, the way we create bots makes it very easy to scale. You can read more about this in our How Chessiverse Bots Are Created article.

Another way of doing this is to have one, or a few, bots that can be adjusted. Like setting the strength, choosing openings, picking a playstyle and so on. We think this is a bit boring, it's much more fun having many different bots to choose from.

How does premium work? Why doesn't feature X work without premium?

Our intention is that the premium model should be very easy to understand. Without premium you get access to a smaller set of bots. With premium you get access to all bots.

Hiding features behind premium has not been our goal. However, some features have ended up behind premium anyway, but for specific reasons.

The Guess the Elo and Speedrun features work really poorly if you don't have access to all the bots. And similar with Speedrun.

You can read more about premium on our Premium page.

I noticed that a bot played a really strange move, do you want to know about it?

Short answer. Yes! Absolutely. The more data we can get from our users, the more accurately we can improve the bots. We might have explanations for some things happening, but in most cases, it's just good data that we're very happy to receive.

You can report things like this either in our Discord, or contact us directly.

Will you have real tournaments in the future? How about feature X?

We have a huge backlog of ideas, and we're working through it as quickly as we can. Tournaments is definitely near the top of the list and will be coming. But the backlog is packed with other awesome features that we want to implement, expect cool things coming regularly!

If you have a cool idea or feature that you think we haven't thought of, or that you think we should really prioritize, please let us know! You can reach us either in our Discord, or contact us directly.