Leela Chess Zero
Shares rank 4 of 5 chess engines by recommenders
Free chess engine built on deep neural networks, named by people among the strongest chess engines and used in top-level play.
Free chess engine built on deep neural networks, named by people among the strongest chess engines and used in top-level play.
5 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 5
- criticize it
- 0
- approval share
- 100%
Recommended in 4 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 5 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- Nobody criticizes itNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 4 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Strong deep learning chess engine
“Heavily train a deep learning model for chess and you get Leela, an absolutely monster.”
Comment from 26 Sep 2026 in “Show HN: A Claude Code skill to analyze your chess games” “the best chess models like Leela Chess Zero use deep neutral networks”
Comment from 5 Nov 2025 in “I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel” “some of the most popular/strongest ones”
Comment from 16 Sep 2026 in “Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes” Strong against top players
“So that's a score of 2 out of 16. Which is apparently actually very good.”
Comment from 16 Feb 2026 in “Magnus Carlsen Wins the Freestyle (Chess960) World Championship” “There are many examples of top players playing Leela Knight Odds.”
Comment from 16 Feb 2026 in “Magnus Carlsen Wins the Freestyle (Chess960) World Championship”
Other chess engines people recommend
The four most recommended other chess engines, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stockfish | 47 | 8 | 85% | 9 | — | Approved |
| Sameshi chess engine | 10 | 3 | 77% | 1 | — | — |
| Chessmaster 3000 | 6 | 0 | 100% | 3 | — | — |
| Leela Chess ZeroThis page | 5 | 0 | 100% | 4 | — | — |
| Regex Chess | 5 | 4 | 56% | 1 | — | — |
What people said
All 6 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Heavily train a deep learning model for chess and you get Leela, an absolutely monster.”
“some of the most popular/strongest ones”
“There are many examples of top players playing Leela Knight Odds.”
“So that's a score of 2 out of 16. Which is apparently actually very good.”
“stockfish, leela or whatever”
“the best chess models like Leela Chess Zero use deep neutral networks”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.