2025 Kaggle Game Arena Chess Exhibition Tournament: Official Discussion Thread - Chess Forums

Wind

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The 2025 Kaggle Game Arena Chess Exhibition Tournament takes place August 5-7, featuring eight of the world's leading Large Language Models (LLMs) competing in chess.

The Kaggle Game Arena is Google's new public platform where Large Language Models (LLMs) compete in strategic games. The AI Chess Exhibition Tournament is the platform's inaugural event.

Eight of the world's leading LLMs are set to dispute the first ever platform event.

The tournament will follow a single-elimination format, with seeding based on preliminary test matches. Following the tournament, a continuously updated leaderboard with Elo-like rankings will be made available on Kaggle to track the performance of all participating models. This will give the public a clear way to see which AI is the best at chess.

Initial Seeding (show details)

Initial seeds are assigned according to Kaggle's preliminary internal testing, with top-ranked models facing lower-ranked opponents to ensure a balanced bracket and prevent the two highest seeds from meeting before the final.

Bracket Format (show details)

The tournament unfolds as a single-elimination, best-of-four contest: the first model to reach two points (one per win, half for a draw) moves on.
If the score ties 2-2, an additional sudden-death game settles the match, in which white must win to advance (similar to armageddon in chess).
To keep each head-to-head clash within a two-hour livestream window, there are no per-move clocks—instead, replays are accelerated for streamlined viewing.

Tournament Stream (show details)

The streamed chess tournament and championship is based on a small subset of game runs selected at random. The final leaderboard will be based on approximately 100 matches per model pairing to generate a statistically robust ranking based on model scores and performance metrics. The full results will be released soon.
During the gameplay, spectators are able to see each of the models reasoning about their moves, including how they respond to their own failed attempts.
Gameplay speed is adjusted to ensure an optimal viewing and commentating experience. Model response latency shown during the stream is not indicative of the true model response latency that will be reflected in the final leaderboard or the replays available after the conclusion of the tournament.

Watch the live coverage on ChessTV and on GM Hikaru's Twitch/Kick channels.
Tune in for the event's daily recaps on IM Levy's YouTube channel.
Find all relevant links/info below and use the comments for discussion on the event.

Announcement - Chess.com preamble news item on the inaugural event
Events Page - Full info with Schedule, Format, Players, Games, and more
Kaggle Game Arena - Google's new platform where LLMs compete in strategic games

Date - August 5-7
Format - Single Elimination Knockout
Players - Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 2.5 Flash, OpenAI O3, OpenAI O4-Mini, Claude 4 Opus, Grok 4, DeepSeek R1, Kimi K2
Location - Online