Chess by the numbers
What is the most legal moves possible in one chess position?
218. Nenad Petrović composed a position with 218 legal moves for White in 1964, and in 2024 a computer search proved that no position reachable in a real game can have more.
Nine queens, two rooks, two bishops and two knights, placed so that they hardly get in each other’s way. This site’s move generator counts the same 218 moves.
The proof, published on the Lichess blog in 2024, treated the question as an optimisation problem; a solver showed that no position reachable from the start has more than 218 legal moves.
In real games
The starting position has 20 legal moves. Positions in the middle of a game typically offer about 30 to 40. Early in the game the numbers stay small: among all the positions after two moves each, the most legal moves any of them has is 46 (computed by this site).