i went to martins new years party

i try 3 | 5 bot games, win against magnus, complete chess-ending bingo, and achieve my dream of O-O-O# !!!

all that and more in this months bot review.

to set the mood, shall we first put on some music recommended by martin?

martin is referencing "now thats what i call music," which released to cd in 1984. the legendary sneezing hit below also released in 1984, so press play and lets get this party started!

theme and visuals

the january bot theme for 2026 is "new years," featuring five familiar faces all dressed up and ready to celebrate another year of chess.

these five popular chess.com bots are celebrating new years together, at martins house!

this month has no custom visual theme, but we did get special promotional art:

our five partygoers have full torsos and even arms and hands! have u ever seen martins hands before? has anyone?

it is great to see them all physically together as if they are taking a group photo at the new years party. i love the chess confetti. that same confetti would have made a fun background for the visual theme, i wonder why they chose not to have one this month?

now that we are here at the party, it is time to greet our host.

1. new years martin (260)

his 2026 glasses are incredibly cool. look at those springs and that bling! they complement his eyebrows enormously.

usually martin is rated 250, but new years martin has new skills to show us, with an impressive 260.

perhaps that explains how he was able to pull off an en passant against me!

i genuinely wondered whether martin would know en passant when i went b2-b4. indeed, he is a man of 2026, a man with many talents and many friends.

but our featured game has something even more rare and exciting than martin doing an en passant...

it has long been my dream to long castle into checkmate. i have ruined more than one good position in pursuit of this goal. in this next game with martin i pursue the possibility while making polite party chitchat and sharing our new years resolutions.

imagine how thrilled i was to see this in my game review:

my year might already be complete?

new years martin is a solid and fun chessbot that makes a wonderful addition to martin lore. tho he gets no points for innovation, it is good to spend time with a familiar face over the holidays. i rate him a solid 7.5/10

while editing this post, i dreamed a friend of mine was cooking a pot of soup in their oven, influenced by this dialogue line:

my kitchen skills are quite poor, so i had to look up what kind of soups one might make in an oven. hearty stews, soups with root vegetables or lentils... then i came across this chess.com post by @raync910 about the tradition of split pea soup at the tata steel chess tournament (happening now! ur favourite chess player may be eating split pea soup as i write this and as u read it!).

given my new soup knowledge, i believe split pea would be a good candidate for an oven-baked soup. i have never before felt a desire to travel for chess, but they make that split-pea soup sound so good...

bumping new years martin to 8/10, as a bribe to get the recipe.

2. new years janjay (725)

janjay is a beginner bot rated 700. for new years 2026 she has replaced her usual hoop earrings with cute tasseled star earrings, she has gold glitter eye makeup, and she has gained 25 rating points.

i played janjay once long ago, before i started posting about my bot games. at this party i finally get to know this character a little better.

i will admit im not good at faking interest in astrology at parties, but my hesitancy was quickly overcome by my curiosity about janjays other attributes. she is from liberia, which i dont exactly think of as horse country. she surely must have developed her passions thru some interesting life experiences, and i want to hear about them.

i won my first games too quickly to learn much about her, so i will share our 3rd game, where i tried playing with 10 | 5 time controls.

thats right, u can play with time controls against the bots! its an option i have wanted for years, and it has existed this entire time. i just hadnt noticed cuz its hidden deep among the assistance tools, which i never opened before this past month.

because i had to make sure i played quickly, paradoxically janjay and i got to have a longer conversation, with more total moves played and thus more dialogue lines to share.

fun bot, good horse energy. a solid 7/10

3. new years nelson (1375)

omg look at those cute lil raindeer ears. and his nelson jumper. this is a man that radiates charisma and is ready to have a great 2026.

i blogged about my first game with nelson almost exactly 2 years ago. he was a distinctive character even then, announcing his intentions clearly:

the chess.com bot interface has changed a little bit in the past 2 years, but nelsons playstyle has not.

here is that game from january 2024. looking back now, i find the first 2 moves rather funny, but i was doing my best for someone with only 2 weeks of chess experience.

if i could beat him on my first try as someone with almost no chess experience, surely 2 years of study later he should be childs play.

i will be honest with u, dear reader, i lost my first game with new years nelson, in this position:

i remember looking at this voice line and thinking "oh it is so sweet that nelson would do anything for martin, im so here for this friendship, lets goooo" and then immediately blundering this obvious rook take that would have let me continue my plan to promote and win.

this wasnt a timed game. i have no excuse. i guess his strategy of overwhelming the opponent with pure rizz is working.

but i enjoy nelson, so i didnt mind playing another game to win, then winning as black, then  trying out the new-to-me timed formats and winning in 15 | 10, 10 | 5, and 5 | 5.

my first 3 | 2 things were getting really fast for me, and i lost on time.

we did play again on 3 | 2, and this time i won. its not a pretty game but its the one i will share, to soothe my ego into believing ive at least made progress on speed since 2024.

i enjoyed that nelsons character at the new years party is consistent with his usual character. he didnt bring much that was new to the conversation, or to nelson lore. but nelson is nelson. i will cheer for him always. a decent 6.5/10

live game interlude: the last draw

at this point i thought to myself:

"ive been stuck at a rating of 400-450 in blitz for over a year. i dont play it much cuz its too fast for my old brain to think. but if i can win a 3 | 2 against a 1375 rated bot, why not against 400 rated humans?"

i decided i would play 5 live blitz games, win or lose.

...and with a 2-2-1 score i managed to prove absolutely nothing.

but there was one bright spot for me in this set of games, because i finally filled out my bingo card of all possible ways to end a chess game!

i blogged last year about collecting draws by 50 move rule, repetition, stalemate, and insufficient material. but i never collected draw by agreement, cuz bots cant agree to a draw, and in 400 blitz i think its fair to expect my opponent to prove their endgame knowledge even when theory says its a draw or a loss.

but for the first time i got a live game where it truly was a draw even for people at our level.

here is that game, with some analysis.

i prefer this draw to either of my wins. i would rather have a variety of chess experiences that add color to my life, than get bogged down chasing elo.

let me take a moment to make real this bingo card ive been imagining in my head. here u go if u want to play chess endings bingo in 2026:

now back to the party!

4. new years wally (1850)

i adore this jello-mold-lookin bucket hat, and i didnt even notice until i got this zoomed in screenshot that the detail on the hat that looked like holly berries from afar is actually a cleverly shaded chess pawn.

its the details like that that make u know that these bots are designed by real people who want to make nice things for other real people to enjoy.

when i met wally in the regular bot sets in february of 2025, his bot personality trait was that he is afraid of dinosaurs. i even photoshopped together this thumbnail for my wally bot post.

it took me a few games to beat him, back then.

but new years wally seems to have gotten past his dinosaur phobia, or perhaps it is a memory issue. the wally of 2026 has dialogue based on his forgetfulness and losing things.

perhaps his memory issues will improve my chances of beating him?

...on the other hand, maybe it feels a little sad to take advantage of his memory loss.

in our first game, i mouse slipped on move 3. i recognised the dutch, went for the book response g3, and slipped to g4, attacking the dutch f5 pawn directly. had i just made a huge blunder?

while unusual, there are some games in the database in this position, and while not ideal it is still almost even. in theory. but i didnt know that at the time, and all preparation i had against the dutch was now out the window.

i had no idea what to do.

but perhaps, if im lucky, wally wont either?

i knew i had only won this game due to wally making mistakes and not punishing mine. so i did what i did with all the other bots, and went for a timed rematch as black.

wally is a challenging opponent for me, and the longest time control available for bot games is 1 hour. bots play moves instantly, so that hour is one literal hour total, rather than the classical-length my slow brain likes. wally plays a variety of openings, and my only black repertoire is the sicilian, so i usually couldnt rely on opening knowledge to save time.

i suffered many losses, blundering trying to rush the opening or blundering a winning endgame in time trouble. but eventually he gave me a sicilian and was kind enough to blunder before i did, and i won with plenty of time to spare.

now we move on to the final guest at martins new years party.

5. new years magnus (2882)

this bot is a depiction of real life chess player magnus carlsen. he is festive with a fluffy green garland worn as a scarf over his red hoodie. he is also more detailed, and with more luscious hair, than previous depictions of carlsen on chess.com.

in january 2024 all 5 bots were different depictions of magnus carlsen. back then i didnt know castling queenside was a legal move, much less who the top players are. but thru playing the bots i learned that he is a real person who has a branding relationship with chess.com.

even knowing nothing about the guy, it was clear to me that the bot voice of carlsen was really of the chess.com brand, with it all being just a bit of fun, rather than things the real life person might say. which i think is good cuz it would feel uncomfortable to me if a tech company tried to get real serious about making bot versions of real people.

and now he is back as one of martins guests!

new years magnets is another solid entry into the slightly absurd world of magnus carlsen bots.

but can i beat him?

no, obviously not.

unless...

i only just tried the assistance tools for the first time earlier this month, and havent explored them all. in theory, infinite takebacks along with eval bar feedback make it inevitable to win a game, so long as i dont blunder mate. i thought adding a time limit to that might make for a worthy challenge.

in my following games with new years magnus i learned that takebacks dont bridge the gap between our skills as far as i had expected. there are simply too many possibilities, all of which lead to me getting slowly ground down and not knowing when it all went wrong.

unless...

...what?

new years magnus bot... resigned? against me?

i think the takeback feature combined with the timed game feature led to something breaking. i played a few more games with takebacks both to see if i could get better at it and to see if i could replicate the issue, to have better info for the tech team, and then i reported the bug.

the featured game i will share is one where i used no assistance tools and had an authentic loss.

playing against magnus bot felt like playing against stockfish. writing-wise i thought it odd that so much dialogue was carlsen complaining about being a chess.com bot... written by the chess.com bot writers...

given my bias against fictionalized depictions of real people, i will be honest that this is a 4.5/10 bot for me. i wont miss it come february, but it was a good bot for exploring new ways to use the assistance tools and having a very different experience than with the rest of the set.

in previous months a weaker 5th bot might have left me feeling a little anticlimactic about the set, but now that i know about bot time controls i had fun going back to my favourite bots to enjoy some challenging games and find new dialogue lines. i won a 1 minute no increment game against martin, and had to use my full brain to do it!

closing thoughts

14/15 crowns overall!

so many things happened while playing this set, its hard to pick a favourite moment. O-O-O# was a longstanding goal, but it was so awkwardly done that im not sure it beats out winning chess bingo, liberian horse energy, or having oven soup visions in my dreams.

thank u chess.com for another fun monthly bot experience, and i cant wait to see what u come up with for february.

until then, in honor of martins favorite thing to watch on youtube, heres a timelapse of grass growing. set it down to half speed and enjoy.