the 1300 bots: nelson-bot, vinh-bot, jade-bot

the 1300 bots are no longer very forgiving of blunders, but if u play carefully they are not too difficult. they make plenty of sub-optimal moves, and are sometimes forgiving of ur misses and inaccuracies.

nelson-bot, aka junior-bot, has a thing for queens:

usually i look to the board to read the opponents intentions, but since nelson-bot announced them ahead of time i thought maybe i should take my knight out to restrict the queen’s diagonal. but after his pawn moved forward i wasnt sure what to do.

i didnt want to move my knight forward just to get chased around while my opponent develops and i do nothing for several more moves. so i thought the mature thing to do was cut my losses and move the knight back to where it came from, play a defensive game, and hope the bot’s pawn would be overextended and create weaknesses.

on review, i wasnt as clever as i felt. but i did ok.

the mistake i really wish id seen at the time was that i could zwischenzug this rook escape. there’s no rush to avoid the bishop, if i go in for the fork: 

i spent all this time setting up that fam fork, thinking the queen would defend. i was also keeping an eye on g2, determined to notice if the bishop moved, because noticing b2/g2 weaknesses is still a goal of mine. so when the bishop came in to defend instead, i was ready to attack b2 and pull the bishop back out. i expected the bishop to go for my rook in exchange when it had the chance, so when it went for my bishop instead i leapt at the chance to save my rook.

because of this reaction, if junior-bot hadnt blundered the defense i wouldve lost the chance to fork and win the queen. the forcing move would give me the chance to save the rook on the next turn. but the bot did blunder the defense, so i was able to hit it on the next move, which was very gracious of it.

to my horror, i let myself get almost checkmated. i simply did not notice white’s rook had just moved in line with mine, cuz i was focused on my own attack and starting to get lazy since i was way up on points.

after hanging my rook and a scary sequence of checks, i refocused and pulled it together to win the game.

also, nelson-bot is called junior-bot in game? i guess they renamed him and didnt change it everywhere? or his dads name is also nelson?

vinh-bot:

my first game with vinh-bot, i lost. i felt like my position was really solid defensively out of the opening, but i wasnt sure how to move the game forward. too many of my pieces were stuck in the back and i couldnt mount a proper offense. i made a miscalculation here, taking a bad trade just to get things moving:

i managed to recover from this, but later i straight up blundered to a rook i didnt notice. again.

new mission: notice rooks

at first i felt like there was a chance in the endgame, if i could manage the pawn promotion i was going for. but i think i was too hasty to try to get there, and should have instead used the continued threat to split white’s forces. think there were some good ideas in endgame and if i were a better player i couldve turned it around. then again, if i were a better player id be playing better opponents.

for my rematch against vinh-bot, i wanted to take more space on the queenside and not get my light squared bishop super stuck. and i wanted to not blunder, so i played really slowly and carefully.

and i succeeded, not only in getting no blunders, but also in getting no misses or mistakes! i think this is the first time that has happened for me in a full game!

my one inaccuracy was in the opening:

sometimes i forget to consider that pawns dont have to either take or get taked, they can just keep moving forward. when white’s g pawn attacked my knight it was very annoying.

i did almost blunder, at one point. i did a pawn move to reveal an attack to the enemy queen, and didnt even notice that it also revealed an attack to my own:

it wouldve been a fine trade in this case, so it wasnt technically a blunder, but it couldve been. i didnt even notice. the white queen ran as expected and i almost didnt see that my queen was under attack on my next turn, either! luckily i noticed in time.

my brain was pretty tired at that point since i had been playing this one game for so long and thinking so hard on every move. this game took me at least an hour, maybe 2. which is the only way to get 87% accuracy when ur this new to the game. now i can go for 90%!

the other 1300 bot in the intermediate bot section is jade-bot, and i talked about that game in my previous post cuz it was an interesting one.

next up are the 1400 bots! thats starting to sound like a pretty high number.