Commercial GUIs
To play a game against MadChess, I recommend using Hiarcs Chess Explorer Pro and Shredder. Both Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) support UCI_LimitStrength, which enables you to adjust chess engines to your playing strength. You may adjust playing strength manually by entering an Elo rating. Or you may configure the GUI to adjust playing strength automatically. If you configure the GUI to automatically match your playing strength, it will set the engine’s Elo rating based on your win-loss-draw record against it.
Hiarcs Chess Explorer Pro
Hiarcs Chess Explorer Pro is, in my amateur (player) opinion, the best database management software on the market. Many professional chess players use ChessBase. They use it because they are professionals, it’s been unchallenged on the market for decades (until recently), so they’re willing to overlook an accumulation of bugs that have gone unfixed for years in order to access advanced features that aid tournament preparation. However, as a professional (software developer), I cannot see ChessBase’s visual shoddiness and application bugginess as anything but incompetence and / or disregard for user experience.
Shredder
Fritz
Because Fritz is a popular GUI, I will pass along a word of warning to those intending to use it to play against MadChess at reduced strength: Fritz provides many methods to play against a weakened chess engine (Rated Game, Sparring, Friend Mode, and Handicap and Fun), none of which are enabled for UCI engines like MadChess. All of these methods use a proprietary, non-UCI Fritz engine, no matter which engine is loaded in the GUI.
Due to this- in my opinion- bug, it is not possible to play against MadChess at reduced strength in the Fritz GUI.
Free GUIs
A few generous programmers have written Graphical User Interfaces and provided them free of charge. Among free GUIs, I recommend Myracle. It’s rock-solid stable and has many features. Though feature sets differ among these GUIs- which I lack ambition to detail here- so if Myracle doesn’t have a specific feature you need, consider downloading another GUI to see if it does.
- Myracle (Best GUI for running engine tournaments. Also supports playing against engines.)
- Cute Chess
- Banksia
- Arena
- Tarrasch
- Lucas Chess
- ChessPad
- Shane’s Chess Information Database (SCID)
GUI Customizations
See the GUI Customizations page for board and piece themes I’ve created (or um… borrowed).
I work as a Software Architect at an insurance company. We're building a modern tech stack in the cloud using C#, Azure, ASP.NET Core, Angular, TypeScript, etc.