♟️ Chessiverse Review | AMAZING 600+ human-like chess AI-bots! 🤖👍

#chessiverse #review #bots 

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• Get a 20% discount on the Chessiverse Premium!
• Get up to 10-17% discount at the Chessnut store (can be used in conjunction with other coupons, though the total saving is capped)
• Get a 10% discount at the ChessUp store

TL;DR:
Chessiverse is an amazing online platform with its 600+ and growing range of quirky AI-bots that play in a human-ish fashion. In addition to playing games, these power a range of fun challenges, puzzles, and other training tools. The included educational chess videos on the platform by IM John Bartholomew (one of the co-founders) on the Chessiverse premium tier represents incredible value. If you use a compatible electronic chess board, Chessiverse is a “killer app” that is a must try, and practically a must buy.

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I’ve been a member of Chessiverse for over a year and have been on the Premium Tier with the full range of features for about a month. I identified early on that the central feature of Chessiverse, the massive range (600+ at the time of writing in November 2025) of AI-chess bots trained to play like a human of a particular strength and style, synergised extremely well with electronic chess boards. I still feel this is the case, and you can check out my previous demonstrations of Chessiverse with the Chessnut Move robot, and the ultraportable Chessnut Go board.

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The problem with traditional chess bots

Most of us have played chess bots before. Chess.com has a very good range of bots. As someone who is Gen X, I grew up playing a range of classic computer chess bots of varying strengths from the 1980s and 1990s, and I’ve demonstrated some of these before on my channel!

If you’ve some experience with bots, you’d know that they are often not very fun to play against recreationally, at least, not repeatedly. The problem fundamentally is that they don’t play in a human-like manner.

If the bot is designed to be strong, they are basically the terminator, relentless and unforgiving, and it is simply impossible to win. At times, they’ll play inexplicable moves, that turns out to be technically better in a mostly meaningless manner. That’s no fun.

However, typical chess engines that are designed to be weaker, are “weakened” by reducing their search depth, and by the engine mechanically selecting a move that it is has evaluated to not be the best (e.g., the second or third best move). However, sometimes these moves are inhumanly bad – e.g., shuffling a piece, or hanging a piece for no good reason. This breaks the illusion we are playing against a mind.

There are other aspects that make chess engines not fun to play against. Any single bot will often play in a fairly similar manner – the lack of variety can be boring. With computational speed so fast nowadays, most bots can practically move immediately, and where a wait time is engineered, this might not be very realistic. The effect is that chess bots typically simulate a person playing within a time control poorly. And lastly, as bots don’t evaluate candidate moves with human cognitive biases, romantic style traps and aggressive attacks simply don’t work against bots, even weak ones, and so often can’t be practiced well.

Around five years ago in 2020, Maia was first introduced to the world as a chess bot designed not to play increasingly accurately, but rather, to play like human players at different skill levels. This innovation became possible following the original (and closed source) AlphaZero with its convolutional neural network approach, and then its open-source implementation with Leela Chess Zero. I remember playing against Maia for the first time, and seeing it fall for an opening gambit in a realistic way. Yes!

Chessiverse bots

Exactly how Chessiverse’s bots work is, of course, their commercial IP and I wouldn’t expect this to be shared. However, if I had to guess, it would probably be using something like Lc0 with a custom trained neural network at its core. On their website, David Kramaley, one of the cofounders who also happens to be a cofounder of Chessable.com, has an article describing what they’ve called PersonaPlay™️. They don’t describe the maths but do give a basic description of their process. To quote:

• Every bot has its own unique neural network, selected to match playing strength and playing style.
• We generate unique opening books for every bot, based on millions of real human games. Each opening book is carefully crafted to perfectly match what you would expect from every individual bot.
• We add a layer of adjustments to further enhance the unique character of each bot. Some bots get into time trouble, some are likely to blunder more, some never resign and some have weak openings. We currently have over 30 distinct behaviours.
• To ensure you can quickly find a bot that's right for you, we calibrate each bot's rating against our users, and we've simulated over a million matches to get the ratings exactly right.
• A playing style only feels authentic if it comes with a personality. That's why we've created thousands of images, background stories, ChatGPT triggers, quirks and traits of all our bots. Taking it that critical extra step to feel real.

The result is that Chessiverse has managed to create a roster of 633 bots (on 11/11/2025), each of which genuinely play differently to each other, and play human-ish. I must admit having seen some odd moves by some of the bots, but Chessiverse bots have largely been able to maintain the illusion in the games that I’ve played so far. A part of this is that Chessiverse has managed to simulate “thinking times” for the bots realistically. For instance, the bots play openings quickly but will often pause at a move that deviates from theory, or at a tricky position! I’ve have found this surprisingly convincing!

A declaration of a conflict of interest… It isn’t ready yet, but Chessiverse has been building a vitualis the Chess Noob bot! 🤩👍

It’s not just having bots, it’s what you do with them!

On most chess platforms and apps that have a small selection of bots, they are typically used to act as opponents to low stakes, low stress, recreational games. And that’s exactly what you’d expect! Chess.com is probably the first service I’ve used that made use of a few selected bots as instructors, to provide guidance on analysis.

Chessiverse, with their hundreds of bots, takes this to the next level. Firstly, we can search and filter the list of bots based on their persona, play style, and opening preferences! If I wanted to play against a bot who responds with let say, the Caro-Kann Defense, I can do just that! But that’s just the beginning. Chessiverse uses their bots to create a range of challenges, that really helps mix things up. These include:

• A random match up with a bot
• Playing against a bot that “exploits your weaknesses”
• Playing against a bot that “matches your playstyle”
• Playing an endgame position against a bot from a historical game
• Playing from a position from a more recent master game
• Climbing the ranks of a virtual “chess club”
• Playing a “speedrun” to see how high in the ranks you can reach
• And the clever, “guess the ELO” where you play against an anonymous bot and try to guess the ELO rating of the bot!

Training features

601 Practice Positions

Chessiverse includes three major features to help with training. The first are modules/lessons based on practice positions, and there’s quite a lot of content. At the time of writing, there were a total of 601, spread over four major categories: openings, middlegames, endgames, masters.

Openings:

• 1. e4
• 1. d4
• Other first moves

Middlegames:

• Classic attacks
  • The Greek Gift
  • Pawn Storm
  • Rook lift
  • Fishing Pole
  • Double bishop sacrifice
• Structures to know
  • The IQP – Isolated Queen’s Pawn
  • Maroczy Bind
  • Carlsbad Structure
  • Hedgehog Structure
  • Hippopotamus Structure
  • Minority Attack
  • Stonewall Formation
  • Hanging Pawns

Endgames:

• The basics
  • Basic Checkmates
  • Mop up with the queen
  • Solo pawn
  • Pawn with piece
  • More pawns
  • One pawn each
• Next level
  • King and pawns
  • Minors and pawns
  • Rooks and pawns
  • Queen and pawns

World Champions:

• Games from ALL of them!

4320 Puzzles!

Chessiverse currently includes a goodly number of puzzles (as not much of a puzzle player, I doubt that I’ll get through any more than a tiny proportion!), and these are categorised over five levels: beginner, novice, intermediate, skilled, and advanced. Most are in the intermediate to advanced categories.

Premium videos with IM John Bartholomew!

IM John Bartholomew is a very popular chess YouTuber, Twitch streamer, and cofounder of Chessable. He also happens to be a cofounder of Chessiverse, and one of the absolute gems on the service that isn’t obvious until you subscribe to the Premium tier is that he has recorded an amazing series of exclusive educational videos!

And these are not short meme videos, or quick superficial content. Many of the videos are over an hour, and cover concepts of an opening in some depth.

Electronic chess boards connectivity through Chessconnect

If you own an electronic chess board that is compatible with Chessconnect (including Chessnut, ChessUp, DGT Pegasus, Millenium boards, and the iChessOne), I would propose that Chessiverse is a killer app that massively improves the board! Most of the electronic chess boards will have access to bots to play against, but it’ll generally be a Stockfish based engine, Leela Chess Zero, and Maia if we’re lucky. Of course, there are bots available through Chess.com and Lichess as well, but I’ve already described the problem with traditional chess bots. Do yourself a favour and give it a go with the 7-day trial!

Check out my two recent videos on my YouTube channel that demonstrates Chessiverse in action: absolutely 🌟brilliant🌟 with the Chessnut Move robot board, and very fun out and about with the ultraportable Chessnut Go.

Price

There is a free tier, which is nice, but you only have a relatively small number of bots that you can use on the tier. Nonetheless, it’ll give you a flavour of what the bots are like. Chessiverse also has a free 7-day trial of the Premium tier. My view is that if you like what you see, there is nothing to lose with seeing what the premium tier has to offer for a week, and you can cancel if you find that it doesn’t suit.

Otherwise, a premium plan can be purchased monthly (USD $9.99/month), yearly at $99.99, or a once-off lifetime membership for $299. If you use my coupon code CHESSNOOB64, you’ll receive a 20% discount (USD $7.99 / $79.99 / $239.20).

Note: I do not receive a commission from Chessiverse – this is simply a viewer/reader discount!

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My thoughts

If it isn’t clear, I really like Chessiverse. It beautifully fills a niche, and I’m a little surprised that nobody has done this before; I guess that someone must be first! Over the past month, Chessiverse has regularly released new bots, increasing the roster by roughly ten a week. I’ve noticed that they’ve fixed some minor UI bugs and have been putting new content on the service, for instance the premium videos from IM John Bartholomew.

There are some potential cons to Chessiverse, and probably the main one is the cost of the premium tier. Even with the discount, USD $8 per month is not an invisible expense. In an environment where many people are satisfied with Lichess, and the free tier of Chess.com, it might not be an acceptable cost. It is, however, what it is. The second con is perhaps an aesthetic and philosophical issue, but one that might be polarising for some people. Chessiverse transparently declares that they use generative AI to create some of the visual assets used on their site. The service would not have been able to create the individualised character images otherwise. In this case, it does not bother me, but as the aphorism goes, the customer is always right in matters of taste.

So, is Chessiverse good value? For me, I think so, but I cannot speak for everyone. Chessiverse is probably best for people who like playing against bots, if not for the fact that it is boring to play against the same chess bots time and again. The value proposition goes up substantially if you make use of the training content (practice positions, puzzles, and premium videos). As before, if you own an electronic chess board, especially the Chessnut Move robot board, you really must try out the service! Chessiverse markedly enhances the practical functionality of the board!

But what do you think? Have you tried out some of the bots on Chessiverse and what was your experience? Please let me know in a comment below!

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Learn how to play the best chess opening attacks in the Romantic style with my new book, “Become a Chess Assassin!” available now on your local Amazon store!