Chess by the numbers
Is chess solved?
No. Nobody knows whether a perfectly played game of chess ends in a win for White or in a draw, and nobody expects to find out soon. What computers have solved completely is every position with up to seven pieces on the board: 423,836,835,667,331 of them.
What “solved” means
Game theorists distinguish three levels. A game is solved in the weakest sense when we know who wins with perfect play from the starting position; weakly solved when we also know a strategy that reaches that result from the start; and strongly solved when we know the best move in every position that can arise. Checkers was weakly solved in 2007 by Jonathan Schaeffer’s team: with perfect play it is a draw. Chess is not solved in any of these senses.
What computers have solved
Endgames can be solved backwards, starting from checkmate. Endgame tablebases list every position with a given set of pieces and record for each one whether it is a win, a draw or a loss with perfect play. All positions with up to seven pieces, kings included, are covered: 423,836,835,667,331 of them. The first complete seven-piece set was computed in 2012 on the Lomonosov supercomputer at Moscow State University and took about 140 terabytes; the Syzygy tables of 2018 hold the same results in 18.4 terabytes.
Some of what they found is beyond human intuition. One seven-piece position is a forced mate in 549 moves, and in one eight-piece position 584 moves pass before the winning side can even make progress with a capture or a promotion. Tables for eight pieces, about 3.8 × 1016 positions, have been in the works since 2021, and a first partial set was released on Lichess in 2025.
Why the whole game is out of reach
Chess has about 4.8 × 1044 legal positions (see how many chess positions there are), against about 5 × 1020 for checkers: nearly 1024 times as many. Claude Shannon worked out in 1950 that a machine examining one position every microsecond would need about 1090 years to choose its first move by brute force. Jonathan Schaeffer, who solved checkers, has said that chess would need a breakthrough such as quantum computing.
That does not make it impossible in principle: a proof might not need to look at every position, just as the checkers proof did not. But nobody knows how to do it today.
So is chess a draw?
It is often guessed that perfect play would end in a draw, but nobody has been able to prove it. As long as chess is unsolved, every opening on this site, from the Sicilian to the Bongcloud, is still, strictly speaking, an open question.
Questions people ask
Will chess ever be solved?
Not with any technology known today. The seven-piece endgames alone took a supercomputer, and the whole game has about 1030 times more positions than they do.
Can computers beat every human?
Yes. Computers have been beating world champions since Deep Blue won its match against Garry Kasparov in 1997 (its last game is here), and today’s engines are far stronger than any human. But playing far better than people is not the same as playing perfectly.
Is checkers solved?
Yes. In 2007 Jonathan Schaeffer’s team proved that checkers is a draw with perfect play.