UCI Chess Engine

VeryChess

A project focused on developing chess engine playing on personal PCs, evaluation and testing chess engines. Built by Oleh Sych.

Latest Release Tournaments
A glowing gold chess knight etched onto a microprocessor surrounded by circuit-board traces, representing the VeryChess engine.

About VeryChess

VeryChess is a UCI-compatible chess engine developed as a personal software project at the intersection of chess and programming. The engine is designed to work with UCI-compatible chess GUIs such as Arena, Cute Chess, and BanksiaGUI.

Development is focused on building a clean, understandable architecture, improving engine strength through systematic testing, and documenting every step of the journey publicly.

About the Author
  • UCI-compatible — works with standard chess GUIs
  • Tested in round-robin tournaments
  • Releases documented with full change notes
  • Results published with PGN game files

Latest Release

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VeryChess 0.9.0

Date: 2026 September 13  ·  Release

Release Notes

What's new

This release is about search quality and cost. Two changes add strength outright — aspiration windows (+27.9 Elo) and a transposition table in quiescence search (+9.5 Elo) — while three more make the engine do substantially less work for the same playing strength: staged move generation halves the moves generated per node, a negative extension cuts the tree by a further 16%, and a large internal cleanup drops per-thread memory by 92%. The engine also gains exact endgame knowledge (a KPK bitbase and a KBNvK mating technique) that needs no external files.
Together these are worth roughly +100 Elo in self-play against VeryChess 0.8.0 at a long time control.
🥇 + ~100 ELO points Download

Latest Tournament

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VeryChess 0.2.0 benchmark tournament

3+2 · 7 engines · BanksiaGUI · ARM MacOS platform

Tournament for benchmarking VeryChess 0.2.0, the first version of the engine to support multi-threaded search.

19.5 / 48 →

VeryChess PremiumLeague #1

3+2 · 46 engines · BanksiaGUI · ARM MacOS platform

First public tournament for against 46 engines (including VeryChess) of top strongest engines build for MacOS to establish a performance baseline.

24th place 45.5 / 90 →

Project Goals

  • Build a clean, understandable chess engine architecture
  • Improve engine strength step by step through testing and measurement
  • Run repeatable, documented engine tournaments
  • Publish releases, experiments, and progress openly