Interview with Arseniy Surkov, author of Reckless

Reckless chess engine is making headlines in computer chess by breaking a long term duopoly. Chessdom spoke to Arseniy Surkov about the key features of the engine, the team behind it, and the future of the engines.

Follow Reckless vs Stockfish TCEC Superfinal / Top Chess Engine Championship live on Chessdom

Can you tell us about the team behind Reckless?

Reckless started as a solo, education/self learn project by me, Arseniy Surkov, and served that purpose for a while, however last FIDE World Championship cycle, which Gukesh won, provided me with an incredible twist of fate/lucky break in the form of the FIDE x Kaggle event. During that event I ended up deep diving modern SF search as well as had an opportunity to team up with Peregrine, who even at the time was one of the most respected experts of the field. The event also introduced me to Styx, who ended up being onboard, this chain of events turned out to be the catalyst for our rapid growth. We quickly went from fringes of top 50 to top 10 and beyond. This opened up some incredible opportunities later on, with more community members donating compute time as well as direct strength centric improvements.

Let me call out a few significant contributors now that I have this opportunity:

– Arseniy Surkov: Lead developer, creator of Reckless
– Shahin M. Shahin: Co-author, one of the most prolific SF and Fishtest contributors and well accepted search specialist
– Styx: Co-author, NNUE expert, lead on testing infrastructure and hardware
– CJ: Co-author of Alexandria (top 10) and contributor to Reckless
– Lily: Author of Rose and fondly known in the community as the Queen of SIMD, contributor to Reckless
– Protonspring: Co-author of Torch, contributor to Reckless
– Viren: Co-author of Monty, significant hardware contributor to Reckless

This is just appreciating the top of my head names, but I do appreciate and am grateful for all contributions.

What are the secret ingredients of Reckless?

It’s definitely the people and spirit behind Reckless development, it’s all additive, organic and collaborative. I take pride in Reckless embodying the open source spirit and am grateful to all contributors, including generous hardware donors. Along with this if there’s one thing I’d call out, I’d probably say perseverance and constant quest to out do our last commit. Code, structure and optimizations are all effects of this cause.

Do you remember the first game Reckless played in TCEC? Did you expect to reach the Superfinal in such a short time?

I don’t quite remember the first game as I was just happy about participating at TCEC and didn’t really have any expectations, but I do remember the last few rounds of last season when we narrowly missed the promotion to DivP.

The current season however was very different from the get go, we had made significant progress since last iteration, validated by third party testing and high placement in other events, this we were optimistic on our chances to challenge for a spot in the SuFi (of course it wasn’t a given and we had a great run in DivP to make it!). Having a chance to compete at the TCEC with the very best of the best hardware itself is a privilege and I am happy Reckless is justifying its inclusion.

Reckless has a meteoric rise. What progress do you expect in the coming months/years?

I wouldn’t call the rise meteoric but as a result of constant quest for improvement, I always think the competition is against the last commit to our master repo, and as long as me and the rest of the team are continuing this quest, that constant progress is all that matters. I think this philosophy of constant improvement has served us well thus far and I’m hopeful it’ll continue to be so in the future!

Next on the table we have Stockfish vs Reckless. They were separated by just a point in the Premier Division. Can you make a prediction for the Superfinal?

Ahh I expected this question, but candidly, I think objectively Stockfish is measurably stronger than Reckless at the moment and as a result enters the SuFi as a firm favourite, however Reckless is known to have a bite and I’m hopeful we will see some exciting chess and enjoyable games nonetheless. As our first SuFi appearance (first of many I hope), I just want to sit back and enjoy the moment, it’s been a long journey to here!

The Candidates Tournament 2026 in Cypus will be parallel to the TCEC Superfinal. Will you be following it? What are your predictions?

I will certainly be following the event, after all it’s a lead up to the World Championship battle later on! However with Magnus stepping away from the WC cycle, it does feel a bit hollow/not quite the same, maybe that’s just me though. Having said that the field looks very competitive and I expect an exciting week of high level, high octane chess culminating in our next World Championship challenger! Objectively, I would have to give Fabi the edge before the first moves are played, but we’ve seen upsets (like Ding Liren’s run to the title, go Javokhir!) so whoever keeps their nerves and performs that week has a real shot to make it! However I hope the candidates are looking this way as well and use/benefit from using Reckless for their analysis, if they do use Reckless, it’d be our honor and privilege!