Chess MCP

What pab1ito/chess-mcp MCP server does

The pab1ito/chess-mcp MCP server gives MCP clients structured access to public information from Chess.com. It covers three main areas: player information, game records, and clubs. Player tools can retrieve profiles and ratings or other published statistics, check whether an account is online, and list titled players.

Game-related tools support several levels of retrieval. An agent can inspect a player's current games, find the months for which game archives exist, request games for a particular month, or download that month's games as a PGN file. Club tools provide a club profile and its member list. These capabilities suit questions about public player activity, historical games, titled players, and Chess.com clubs.

How it works

The server calls Chess.com's Published Data API and presents the available operations as MCP tools. The API access is public, so clients do not need to provide a Chess.com token or another credential. The MCP tool set is configurable, allowing an operator to choose which listed operations are exposed to the client.

The available tools are:

• get_player_profile
• get_player_stats
• is_player_online
• get_titled_players
• get_player_current_games
• get_player_games_by_month
• get_player_game_archives
• download_player_games_pgn
• get_club_profile
• get_club_members

Setup and configuration

To run the pab1ito/chess-mcp MCP server with Claude Desktop, the documented Docker configuration starts the pab1it0/chess-mcp image with an interactive standard-input connection. Docker is the recommended setup in the project documentation. The same client configuration pattern can be used on macOS, Windows, and Linux, with the configuration file stored in the platform-specific Claude Desktop location.

A local alternative uses uv to launch src/chess_mcp/main.py from a checked-out project directory. That configuration requires the local project path to be supplied by the operator. If Claude Desktop cannot find the uv executable, the documentation suggests using its full path or setting NO_UV=1 in the client configuration. The project uses uv for dependency management.

Tools and capabilities

Use profile and stats operations for public account details and playing statistics. Use the online-status tool for a current presence check and the titled-player tool for titled-account listings. For game research, monthly archive discovery can precede monthly game retrieval or PGN downloading. Club profile and membership operations cover the club data exposed by Chess.com.

Limitations and notes

Because the pab1ito/chess-mcp MCP server depends on Chess.com's public data API, its scope is limited to information available through that API. It also does not specify rate limits or the exact configuration syntax for selecting individual tools. No authentication is required, and the project is released under the MIT license.