Adopting the Holiday Bots Part One | Powder the Snowman

It's that time of year again. Christmas trees are going up, presents are being bought... and chess.com's holiday bots are back! I'm going to try to adopt each of the five bots: Powder, Eve, Santa, Dash, and Holly.

You can read more about each of the bots here. 

Five bots, and I have to play each one ten times, and win each game for it to count as an adoption. That's fifty games that I have to win in a row, against five bots of different strengths. Can I do it? Who knows. I'm pretty confident about the first few bots, but we'll see if Mrs. Claus is as good at chess as she is at baking cookies .

When playing against bots, you have unlimited time, and there are certain settings you can put in place. First off, you can choose the color that you want to play, or make it random. I'm going to set it random for all of the games so that I get to play the same amount of games as black and white. Next, you get to choose how you can be assisted. Custom means you can choose whatever assistance you want: Bot chat, analysis, hints, threats, evaluation, engine, suggestions and takebacks. That's two out of three crowns. Assisted mode is when you get all of the tools available. One crown. Definitely not. For Friendly you get three takebacks and three hints. Two crowns. But for this challenge, I'm going to play all fifty of the games in Challenge mode. No help at all, just human versus machine. 

It's five days until Christmas. I'm going to attempt to adopt one bot a day, starting today and ending on Christmas Eve, going up the rating ladder. If you want to try this challenge too, here are the (unofficial) rules (that I made up):

• Play all five holiday bots (it doesn't matter in which order)
• You only get to play 10 games against each bot.
• To adopt the bot, you have to win all ten games.
• If you lose or draw a single game against any bot, you have failed .
• You can play any or all of these games whenever you want. All fifty in one day, how I'm doing, ten a day, or whatever split you want. But it has to be before Christmas on the 25th. 
• No cheating. It would be really easy to. When you're playing against computers, (as far as I know) it does not automatically save your game, and you have to save it to your archive yourself. You could "accidentally" forget to save your losing game and continue your winning streak, so this is all about honor. As far as you know, I could be doing this. You're just going to trust me that I'm not

That's it, quite simple. Win ten games in a row against each bot, win it all. Prize? None.

Surprise.

Just kidding. You'll get an award from me if you can send me all fifty adoption games, create a forum about it, or post about it in the comments section in this post or any of the upcoming four posts. And my respect if you don't already have it.

Well, let's get going. First day, first bot. I'm facing Powder the Snowman! 

You probably won't see me trying too hard. I kept drawing black in the random color assignment though...

Let's hope ten nonstop games of chess doesn't overheat Powder... it would be really sad if he melts

Round 1 (Playing Black)

Ooh! I like captures

Oh! My king is attacked? I better get out of check.

Dash loves this opening, but I don't know what it's called.

Ah! You got my queen!

I think Santa and Dash play this move

Ah! You got my queen!