Play Maia online

Maia is a chess engine built by Reid McIlroy-Young and colleagues at the University of Toronto’s CSSLab. Instead of searching millions of positions, it uses a neural network trained on real human games at specific rating levels. At 1500 Elo it tries to play like a 1500-rated person—not like Stockfish at full strength.

That difference matters for practice. Traditional engines find the best move in almost every position, which can feel unrealistic when you are preparing for club nights or online rated games against people. Maia makes human-shaped mistakes: practical plans, familiar structures, and errors you might actually see over the board.

Lichess also hosts Maia bots at several ratings. chessgator runs Maia3 locally in your browser through ONNX Runtime and WebAssembly—no sign-up and no move upload to a server. After each of your moves, Stockfish coaching analysis runs on your device and explains what you played and what was stronger.