Game Arena Chess Openings
Gemini 3 Flash 1,263 leads since February 2026 Language models play chess against each other from varied two-move openings sampled from 20 popular human openings. The board is given as text.
Kaggle published it on February 2nd, 2026 with Chess in a Chess Suite. It had 11 models on November 1st, 2026. Part of the Kaggle Game Arena suite. Varied openings make memorized lines less useful than in standard Chess.
- Made by
- Kaggle and Google DeepMind
- Released
- February 2026
- Kind
- Puzzles and chess
- Level
- Expert
- Scored
- Ranked by matches
- Answers
- Agent task
- Tasks
- All public
- Strongest model tested
- GPT-5.2 #50 on the capability index
- Last model added
- December 2025
- Scores refreshed
- November 12th, 2026
Gemini 3 Flash leads with 1,263 among models released by December 2025
Best score per model from the benchmark's own leaderboard, read on November 12th, 2026. Where a model ran with several settings or harnesses, we keep its best.
The newest model with a score here came out in December 2025, and nobody has tested a newer one. Among the 20 highest-ranked models on the capability index, these have no score yet:
- Claude Fable 5.2
- Gemini 4 Carbon
- GPT-6 Astra
- Claude Opus 5.5
- and 16 more
- 1 Gemini 3 Flash 1,263
- 2 Gemini 3 Pro 1,253
- 3 o3 934
- 4 GPT-5.2 889
- 5 Grok 4 739
- 6 Grok 4.1 Fast reasoning 635
- 7 GPT-5 mini 484
- 8 Claude Opus 4.5 252
- 9 Claude Sonnet 4.5 228
- 10 Claude Haiku 4.5 102
- 11
DeepSeek-V3.2 0
Source: Official Game Arena Chess Openings leaderboard
| # | Model | Score | Setting | Date | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Gemini 3 Flash | 1,263 | Dec 2025 | Official leaderboard | |
| 2 | Gemini 3 Pro | 1,253 | Nov 2025 | Official leaderboard | |
| 3 | o3 | 934 | Apr 2025 | Official leaderboard | |
| 4 | GPT-5.2 | 889 | Dec 2025 | Official leaderboard | |
| 5 | Grok 4 | 739 | Jul 2025 | Official leaderboard | |
| 6 | Grok 4.1 Fast | 635 | reasoning | Nov 2025 | Official leaderboard |
| 7 | GPT-5 mini | 484 | Aug 2025 | Official leaderboard | |
| 8 | Claude Opus 4.5 | 252 | Nov 2025 | Official leaderboard | |
| 9 | Claude Sonnet 4.5 | 228 | Sep 2025 | Official leaderboard | |
| 10 | Claude Haiku 4.5 | 102 | Oct 2025 | Official leaderboard | |
| 11 | DeepSeek-V3.2 | 0 | Dec 2025 | Official leaderboard |
Number one over time
Lab claims count from the day the card came out, independent runs from the model’s release.
Source: Official Game Arena Chess Openings leaderboard
Scores over time
All the scores we have, one dot each, so a model tested at several settings appears more than once.
Source: Official Game Arena Chess Openings leaderboard
No lab model card reports it yet
We read the headline results of 522 launch posts from 52 labs, and none of them list this benchmark.
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