Computer Chess

A curated list of links for computer chess enthusiasts — engines, AI, GUIs, ratings lists, tablebases, test suites, and more. Links maintained by club members.

Found a broken link? Email us at WestportChessClub@gmail.com.

Watch live computer chess

See the best engines compete at TCEC or Chess.com Computer Chess Championship.

Watch Leela Chess Zero (and other Lc0 flavors) get tested on Twitch or YouTube at @edosani, @potato_chess, @brinansee, Mark Young, and sometimes @westportchess.

Free chess engines

Some of the strongest free traditional (non-AI) engines:

asmFish  ·  BrainFish  ·  CorChess  ·  Ethereal  ·  Fire  ·  Fizbo  ·  Komodo 9  ·  Laser  ·  Raubfisch  ·  ShashChess  ·  Stockfish  ·  Stockfish DEV builds  ·  ThothFish  ·  Xiphos

Many more at Computer-Chess.org. We also host some engines for download here.

Free AI chess engines

Leela Chess Zero (Lc0) — a neural-network chess engine.

Download the latest release (use "blas" for CPU-only, "cuda" for NVIDIA GPUs, or "OpenCL" for other GPUs). See the installation guide. You'll also need to download a neural network. Here's a list of the strongest Lc0 networks.

We have backups of several strong Lc0 neural nets (weights files) hosted here.

Opening books for engine testing

Stefan Pohl's opening books are a good starting point. We also host some opening books we like here.

Endgame tablebase (EGTB) downloads

Free computer chess GUIs

Arena  ·  Banksia  ·  ChessGUI  ·  Cute Chess  ·  Lucas Chess  ·  Nibbler (made specifically for Lc0)  ·  SCID  ·  Zentropy

We also have backups of these and more GUIs here.

Tactical test suites

Use a test suite to measure how well your engine handles tactical or endgame positions:

More test suites available here.

Chess forums & communities