Become a Chess Bot

Become a Bot turns a player's real games into a chess bot that plays like them. Give it a Chess.com or Lichess username, your Chessiverse games or a PGN file, and Chessiverse builds a bot with that player's rating, playing style and openings. It is built on the same technology as the 1000+ human-like PersonaPlay™ bots, so it plays like a person at its rating rather than like an engine turned down. Of all the Chessiverse chess bots, it is the only one that knows your repertoire.

Make Your Own Chess Bot Without Writing Code

Most guides to making a chess bot are programming tutorials: write a move generator, add a search, tune an evaluation. That builds a bot that plays chess, not one that plays like you. Become a Bot starts from the other end. It reads how a real player decides, then sets up a human-like bot to decide the same way. You don't write a line of code, and you don't need a strong computer: everything runs on Chessiverse and you play the result in your browser. If you are curious how the engine side works, read How We Build Human-Like Chess Bots and how Chessiverse bots are created.

Can You Train Your Own Chess Bot on Your Games?

You can, and chess players have asked how to train their own chess AI for years. The do-it-yourself route is to export your games as PGN files, build an opening book from them, and fine-tune a human-like engine such as the open-source Maia models on your own moves. It works, but it takes a large set of your games, a training setup and a chess program to play the result in. Become a Bot does the same three jobs for you: it calibrates the bot's strength to your rating, matches its style to how you play, and builds its opening books from your games. For how human-like bots differ from a weakened engine, see Stockfish vs human-like chess bots, and for how the main bot platforms compare, see the best chess bots online.

How Your Bot Learns From Your Games

Strength. Chessiverse reads the ratings in your games across bullet, blitz, rapid and classical, brings Chess.com and Lichess ratings onto one scale, and calibrates the bot to the level they add up to. Before you save it you can choose a different rating, for a stronger or a gentler you. How Chessiverse ratings work explains the scale.

Style. It measures eight things about how you play, among them how creative or theoretical your openings are, whether you keep middlegames simple or complicate them, how patient or forcing you are and how you handle endgames. Together they place you on two scales, attacking to defensive and simplifying to complicating, and the bot is set up to make the same kind of choices. The chess personality test shows where your own style lands.

Openings. It builds a White and a Black opening book from your own games, so the bot opens the way you open. IM Eric Rosen's bot learned its openings from 1,644 Chess.com games, where the London System comes up in 82% of the White games and the French Defence in 59% of the games against 1.e4. Eric Rosen's creator page has the official Eric Rosen bot.

How many games. 100 games by one player is the minimum, and Chessiverse uses up to 5,000. The more you give it, the truer the bot: Chessiverse rates 500 games as Good, 1,000 as Strong and 2,500 or more as Excellent.

Playing Chess Against Yourself

Playing yourself used to mean moving both sides on one board, which mostly trains you to agree with yourself. A bot built from your games answers the way you would, without telling you what it plans. You meet your favourite openings from the other side of the board, find out whether you can beat the habits you rely on, and see which of your plans hold up against someone who thinks like you. The games are private and unrated, so you can experiment freely. For more ways to train against bots, see chess practice and the chess bot training FAQ.

Bots of Friends, Rivals, Coaches and Famous Players

Any public Chess.com or Lichess account works, so you can build the club rival you meet next month, the friend who always wins online, or the coach whose games you study. A PGN file works too: your own over-the-board games, or a collection of games by a player from chess history. Chessiverse already has ready-made bots of chess creators on the creators page and of chess legends on the chess players pages.

Getting Started

Create a free Chessiverse account, open My Bots and choose where your games come from. Chessiverse gathers them, studies them and shows you your bot's rating, playing style and opening style before you save it. Give it a face in the Character Studio or with a picture of your own, then play it whenever you like. Questions about your account or Premium are answered in the Chessiverse FAQ.