How to beat the Antonio bot


Antonio-bot is sort of the "next Nelson" I think, in that once you can beat all the previous bots regularly, this bot steps up. It doesn't make the obvious blunders as often, like just hanging their Queen for no real reason, although at some point it will make some very poor moves. Also, it is more likely to jump on you if you overlook that one of your pieces is under threat. It is a good bot to practice against to improve your "board vision", meaning not overlooking simple things like hanging pieces and so forth. Because the lower bots are quite prone to letting you get away with such things, or prone to making "unsound sacrifices", Antonio-bot at first seems much more difficult as the mistakes it makes are sometimes a bit more subtle.


Way to hang in there and fight back after being down the exchange. Good job.

Antonio plays like a 1000 rated human player (or maybe slightly better, so like 1050 or something) Here’s how I beat him
1. Play the Sicilian Defense
2. I play the Accelerated Dragon. When he puts his bishop on e2 instead of c4, we both castle, and I play my pawn break which is d5. He trades knights and I take with the pawn. When he pushes, I go back to e8. If he doesn’t defend the e-pawn, I take it. If he does, I go for Nc7 with Ne6.
3. Antonio tends to miss tactics and hanging pawns. When I gain material advantage, I try to start trading down material.
4. Once I finally find a way to trade down all the material, I either push a pawn to promotion or checkmate with a queen or a rook that already exists on the board. If Antonio’s king is on the side of the board that has all my pawns, I start pushing the pawns to promotion, forcing him to capture them to clear the way for my queen or rook to checkmate. Of course, I’m trying to avoid stalemate, which is why I didn’t bother to promote my other pawns and just checkmate him.