# Stockfish

47 Hacker News commenters recommended Stockfish and 8 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 9 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Free open-source chess engine that plays stronger than any human and is widely used to analyse games. Critics say its analysis is too strong to teach weaker players and it sometimes gives odd evaluations.

## Why people recommend it

- Stronger than any human or rival engine (7 comments): "Stockfish is the strongest engine and beats AZ-like implementations like Lc0 and the like." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49641309)) "Stockfish is probably stronger, than everything the top labs build." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50003992)) "Stockfish has an ELO of 3644[0], compared to Magnus Carlsen at 2882" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45979625))
- Shows best moves for game analysis (3 comments): "the reason to have Stockfish is not really to play against it, and then inevitably lose, but to use it to show which moves are best" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49642179)) "I've learned a lot from working through games with stockfish using a git repo and a small script" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49666092)) "Stockfish finds all of the right (or better moves) in the games from the original paper." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49641493))
- Steady improvements from a dedicated team (6 comments): "They tend to have good test harness that can give you an idea of whether the speedups are worth the effort." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47833307)) "So, yes, here Stockfish 18 can’t find Rxf2!, but Stockfish 19 does starting at depth 13." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49650487)) "Stockfish has by now adopted the best of both worlds and is the better for it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47125824))
- Strong outside normal chess positions (3 comments): "It’s oddly fun to put maximum Stockfish in play against some horrible position" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49642968)) "I'm still surprised that Stockfish is so good in ridiculous scenarios." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45837047)) "Stockfish works pretty well outside the normal bounds of chess" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47019461))

## What people warn about

- Too strong to teach weaker players (3 comments): "playing vs stockfish does always feel a bit clunky at ~1,700-1,900 ELO" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48098591)) "analysing with stockfish is _also_ useless, unless you're a super GM." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49858700)) "practicing against those engines will teach you very little" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46118997))
- Occasional bad reads and odd evaluations (5 comments): "Evaluation can be way more than just "slightly off" though and can make the evaluation MUCH weaker" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47201773)) "Basically this optimization means that stockfish will sometimes take a bad read from a cache" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49643612)) "It would result in infrequent blunders which however affected my analysis" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49643417))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Sameshi chess engine](https://hackerapproved.com/p/sameshi-chess-engine.md): 10 recommend
- [Chessmaster 3000](https://hackerapproved.com/p/chessmaster.md): 6 recommend
- [Leela Chess Zero](https://hackerapproved.com/p/leela-chess-zero.md): 5 recommend
- [Regex Chess](https://hackerapproved.com/p/regex-chess.md): 5 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Stockfish", https://hackerapproved.com/p/stockfish/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).