Random Chess Opening Generator

What the random chess opening generator does

You play the same first three moves in every game. You know it, your opponents know it, and somewhere around move six you are bored of your own position. So you go looking for something new, and the trouble with looking is that you keep choosing openings that feel like the one you already play.

This tool takes the choice away from you. Press Generate and it hands you the name of a chess opening, drawn from a list that was put together by hand. A few of the names it can give you:

• Ruy Lopez (Spanish Opening)
• Sicilian - Najdorf Variation
• King's Gambit
• Evans Gambit
• Philidor Defense
• Vienna Game
• Danish Gambit
• Petrov Defense (Russian Game)
• Elephant Gambit
• Catalan - Closed Main Line

It gives you the name and not the moves, which is on purpose, and there is a section below explaining why. The rest of this page is about where those names came from, what the codes next to them mean, and whether playing an opening you have never seen is a training method or a good way to lose a Tuesday evening.

How to use it

1. Press Generate. You get one opening. Press it again for another.
2. Set the quantity if you want more than one at a time. Ask for ten and you get ten different openings, never the same one twice in a single draw. Ask for thirty and you have a month of study.
3. Use Contains to pick a theme. This is the useful filter. Type gambit and every result will be a gambit. Type attack, or defense, or Indian, and the draw narrows to those.
4. Use Starts with for a single letter, matched against the first character of the name.
5. Copy saves the list so you can paste it into wherever you keep your notes.

Ends with also takes a letter, and it is the least useful of the three here, because opening names nearly all finish with the same handful of words: Variation, Attack, Gambit, Defense. Reach for Contains instead.

How an opening gets picked

The list is a curated set of named openings, checked by hand against standard opening references rather than scraped from a database. When you press Generate, the tool applies whatever filters you typed, then draws at random from what is left. Every opening still in the pool has the same chance of coming up.

It all runs in your browser. Nothing you type into those boxes is sent to us or to anybody else.

Why every opening has somebody's name on it

The oldest name in chess belongs to a priest. Ruy López de Segura was a Spanish cleric who, in 1561, wrote a book arguing that after 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6, the bishop belongs on b5. Four and a half centuries later we still call that move the Ruy Lopez. The rest of the chess world took nearly three hundred years to agree with him, and only really came round after Carl Jaenisch published a study of it in 1847.

Other openings are named after places, and the places can mislead you. There is nothing Scottish about the Scotch Game. It picked up the name from a correspondence match played in 1824 between the chess clubs of Edinburgh and London, back when one move travelled by post and a single game ran for years.

Some names hide a better story than the opening deserves. The Evans Gambit is named for Captain William Davies Evans, a Welsh sea captain who also invented a three colour lighting system to stop ships running into each other at night. He played his gambit on shore leave in London in the 1820s.

And here is one worth knowing before you say it out loud at a club. The Göring Gambit is named after Carl Theodor Göring, a German player and mathematician who died in 1879. No relation to the other Göring.

Notice what all of these have in common. The name almost never belongs to whoever played the moves first. It belongs to whoever wrote them down, or won a famous game with them, or argued for them loudly enough that other people started listening. Chess names track attention, not invention.

What the letter and number codes mean

Take any opening name from this page, search for it in a database, and you will meet a code like B90 or C65. That is an ECO code, and it is worth two minutes of your time.

ECO stands for the Encyclopaedia of Chess Openings. The classification first appeared in 1966, in the opening issue of the Belgrade journal Chess Informant. A five volume encyclopaedia followed between 1974 and 1979, under the chief editorship of grandmaster Aleksandar Matanović. It divides the whole of opening theory into exactly 500 codes, running from A00 to E99. Five letters, one hundred slots each.

• A, flank and irregular openings. English, Réti, Dutch, Benoni.
• B, semi-open games. Sicilian, Caro-Kann, Pirc, Alekhine.
• C, open games and the French. Ruy Lopez, Italian, King's Gambit.
• D, closed and semi-closed games. Queen's Gambit, Slav, Grünfeld.
• E, Indian defences. Nimzo-Indian, King's Indian, Catalan.

The point of a code is that it carries no language. A player in Kathmandu and a player in Reykjavik need no shared alphabet to agree that B90 is the Najdorf. Names drift between books and databases. Codes do not. So when you look up whatever the generator handed you, search the code.

One thing ECO does not tell you is how two openings feel to play. It sorts by move order, so lines that arrive at similar positions from different directions can sit in different volumes. That gap turns out to matter, and there is a study further down that measured it.

How many chess openings are there?

It depends entirely on what you mean by an opening, and the gap between the answers is the interesting part.

Start with what the rules allow. White has twenty legal first moves: sixteen pawn moves, since each of the eight pawns can go one square or two, and four knight moves. Black has the same twenty replies. So after one move each, the board can be in four hundred different positions. Play on and the branching gets out of hand quickly.

Now count what has a name. ECO carves theory into five hundred codes. The Oxford Companion to Chess lists 1,327 named openings and variations, which is a good working answer if somebody asks you at a party.

So of the four hundred positions available after a single move each, only a few dozen were ever considered worth studying, and the vast majority have no name because nobody has ever wanted to play them twice. Meanwhile a handful of openings, the Sicilian above all, carry dozens of named variations each, because generations of players kept going deeper into the same forest.

That is the honest answer to the question. The number of openings is not a fact about chess. It is a fact about what chess players have paid attention to, and it has been growing for five hundred years.

Why an unfamiliar opening makes you stronger

In 1973, William Chase and Herbert Simon published a paper called Perception in Chess. Borrowing a task from Adriaan de Groot, they showed players a real position for five seconds, took it away, and asked them to rebuild it. The masters did far better than the weaker players, which surprised nobody.

Then they did the interesting part. They took the same number of pieces, scattered them at random across the board into positions that could never arise in a real game, and ran the test again. The masters' advantage nearly vanished. They rebuilt random boards about as badly as beginners did.

So the masters did not have better memory. They had better chess. Where a beginner saw twenty five separate pieces, a master saw a few familiar clumps, which Chase and Simon called chunks. Gobet and Simon later re-ran the experiment with better equipment and confirmed the chunks are real.

Now, what has any of this got to do with pressing a Generate button?

Every opening you learn hands you a set of shapes. The isolated queen's pawn. The Carlsbad pawn chain. A bishop fianchettoed on g7. The doubled c-pawns you get in the Berlin. Play only the Italian Game for a year and you collect Italian Game shapes, and the first time somebody builds a Stonewall against you, you will not know where your pieces belong.

There is a nice piece of evidence about how players actually drift. In 2023, De Marzo and Servedio took millions of games from an online chess platform and built what they call a relatedness network of openings, measuring how similar two openings are to play rather than how similar their move orders look. Openings clustered into communities. And using that network, they could forecast which opening a player would take up next, well ahead of chance.

Read that again, because it is a slightly uncomfortable finding. Left to yourself, your next opening is predictable. You wander to a neighbour of the one you already know. Pressing a button that ignores your history is one way to leave the neighbourhood on purpose.

Let me be straight about the limits of this argument. Chase and Simon never tested opening generators, and neither did De Marzo and Servedio. What is established is that chess strength lives in pattern recognition, that patterns are built by exposure, and that players left alone stay near what they know. The step from there to "so randomise your openings" is a reasonable inference. It is not a proven result, and you should hold it as one.

Playing your random opening without wrecking your rating

None of this is new. Players have been rolling dice, picking ECO codes out of a hat, and calling it their opening of the day for as long as there have been chess forums. The habit works. The way people ruin it is by taking a fresh, unstudied gambit straight into a rated game and then blaming the gambit.

1. Play it unrated first, or in blitz, where a loss costs you nothing you will remember next week.
2. Play it three or four times before you judge it. One game tells you only whether your opponent knew it better than you did.
3. Find where you left theory. After the game, open a database and look for the first move that nobody strong has ever played. It is usually move four or five. That single move is the whole lesson.
4. Do not memorise lines. Ask what the pieces want. Where does the light squared bishop belong. Which pawn break is the plan. Which side of the board is yours to attack on.
5. Keep two or three and throw the rest back. You are not building a repertoire out of a random list. You are auditioning positions to find out which ones you enjoy defending when things go wrong.

That last point is the one that separates study from tourism. An opening suits you when you like the middlegame it produces, and you only find that out by getting a worse position in it and seeing whether you still want to play on.

If you draw a gambit

A gambit hands your opponent material, usually a pawn, in exchange for time and open lines. The Danish Gambit gives away two of them and asks for a pair of raking bishops in return. That is a fine bargain in a five minute game against somebody meeting it for the first time. It is a rough one across a long game against somebody who has read the book.

Some of the gambits in this list are known to be dubious. The Latvian Gambit and the Elephant Gambit are here because they are named, old and genuinely fun, not because a modern engine thinks well of them. If you draw one, play it, enjoy it, and know exactly what you are signing up for.

Questions people ask

Should a beginner play random openings?

For learning, yes. For rating, no. If you are just starting, you will get more from knowing one answer to 1.e4 and one answer to 1.d4 properly than from touring a thousand of them. Learn to walk first. The generator is a good tool for the second stage and a distraction during the first.

Why does it give the name and not the moves?

Because looking it up is the part where you learn something. Take the name to an opening explorer or a database and you get the moves, the statistics, and thousands of games in which stronger players than either of us worked out what the position wants. Reading moves off a page teaches you almost nothing by comparison.

Are all of these openings sound?

No. A few are dubious and one or two are close to bad against a prepared opponent. They are in the list because they have names, history and a following. Soundness and interest are different things, and chess would be poorer if only the sound openings had survived.

Can I get the same opening twice?

Not inside a single draw. Ask for ten and you get ten different ones. Press Generate again and the pool resets, so repeats across separate draws are normal.

What is the best chess opening?

There isn't one, and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling a course. At the top of the game, the Ruy Lopez and the Sicilian have survived every engine and every generation. For you, the best opening is the one whose middlegames you understand, which is exactly what a random draw is for finding out.

References

1. Chase, W. G., and Simon, H. A. (1973). Perception in chess. Cognitive Psychology, 4(1), 55–81. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(73)90004-2
2. Gobet, F., and Simon, H. A. (1998). Expert chess memory: revisiting the chunking hypothesis. Memory, 6(3), 225–255. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9709441/
3. De Marzo, G., and Servedio, V. D. P. (2023). Quantifying the complexity and similarity of chess openings using online chess community data. Scientific Reports, 13, 5327. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-31658-w
4. Matanović, A. (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Chess Openings, Volumes A to E. Šahovski Informator, Belgrade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopaedia_of_Chess_Openings
5. Hooper, D., and Whyld, K., The Oxford Companion to Chess, 2nd edition. Oxford University Press.