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.

My Chess Bot 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.

Master Max is the strongest bot at 2000 Elo — near-master strength. Playing the 2000-rated bots requires a Standard or Premium plan.

Your displayed rating blends two signals. The first 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. The second is a quality rating derived from move accuracy when you review games. Outcome carries most of the weight; reviewing games refines the number once you have several reviewed games on file.

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 My Chess Bot — useful for tracking your own progress over time, but not an absolute rating you can paste into another site's profile.

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.

Premium ($9.99/month) includes access to all 60 bots, no ads, cloud-synced game history, full game review with engine analysis, and every cosmetic — board themes, piece sets, sound packs, and bot skins — unlocked for the duration of your subscription.

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.

My Chess Bot 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.