A personality test played on 64 squares

Which chess legend is hiding in your moves?

Play one game against a bot of random strength. We look at how you attack, how much you sacrifice, how you use the clock and which opening you choose, then match you with Tal, Fischer, Carlsen and 21 other legends, along with each one's cigarettes, yogurts and wristwatches.

♟ 1 game⏱ 2–30 min👑 24 legends

Just for fun. Your result is a vibe, not a FIDE rating.

1

Pick your pace

The time control you choose counts as part of your style.

2

Pick your colour

3

Meet your opponent

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You
You
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Consulting the ghosts of Reykjavík…

Reviewing your moves

About

Which Chess Legend?

A light-hearted experiment in finding links between character, pace, narrative and chess paraphernalia. You play one game, and the app reads your style from your moves and your clock. It then matches you with a legend, a famous game, and a rhythm.

♞
Created by Santiago Renteria with Claude Code. More experiments at www.renterialab.com

How it works

  • The bot is a small chess engine written for this project, using alpha-beta search with quiescence. Its random ELO sets how deep it searches, how much randomness it adds, and how often it blunders on purpose.
  • Your style is scored on 15 traits taken from the game: aggression, sacrifices, accuracy, thinking speed, the pace you chose, castling, king walks, early queen moves, pawn storms, trades, game length, opening theory, knights versus bishops, chaos and time trouble.
  • The legends each have a hand-tuned style profile, plus bonuses for well-known quirks (the Bongcloud, the Fischer clock, Bronstein's long first-move thinks).
  • The closest famous game compares your opening moves, style, result and length with 14 historical games.
  • The rhythmogram treats your moves as beats in time and shows how they cluster at every time scale.

Attributions

  • Inspired by the personality tests at knowsoda.com/tests.
  • Move rules and notation: chess.js v0.10.3 by Jeff Hlywa, BSD 2-Clause License.
  • Engine piece-square tables come from Tomasz Michniewski's Simplified Evaluation Function (Chess Programming Wiki).
  • The move-accuracy formula is adapted from the public method used by Lichess.
  • The rhythmogram is based on Neil P. M. Todd's multiscale rhythmogram model of rhythm perception (1994).
  • Fonts: Fraunces, DM Sans and Noto Sans Symbols 2 via Google Fonts, all under the SIL Open Font License. The pieces are Unicode chess symbols.
  • The famous games are historical game scores in the public domain. The anecdotes (cigarettes, yogurt, wristwatches, cats) are widely retold chess history and folklore, and some of them are more legend than fact.
  • Players are named for educational and entertainment purposes. They are not affiliated with this project and have not endorsed it.

License

© 2026 Santiago Renteria. Released under the MIT License. You are free to use, modify and share it, as long as the copyright and license notice are kept. The source code is on GitHub. Third-party components keep their own licenses.

Built with Claude Code by Anthropic. Everything runs in your browser, and no data leaves your device.