is playing against the bots good practice?

It's better to play against real players if you can but if you can't it's a good practice.

Stockfish or Maia at Lichess.

Stockfish too ez

Bots can be used effectively as training. For example, the "Nelson-Bot" is one that people starting out should play against with the Black pieces. The whole point of Nelson-bot is to learn how to deal with early Queen attacks in e4 e5 openings. This often works early on to overwhelm Black but in the long run is not a great habit to get into and once you know how to handle it that knowledge will help a lot. There are lessons about how to deal with it as well, but to cement what you learn it is very useful to have an opponent who will gladly play into what you want to practice every time. It's probably the one opening defense as Black every starting chess player should learn because when you do play human opponents, you'll probably meet it fairly often until you climb the rating ladder. Even then, you may occasionally come across it, but by then it should be fairly second nature as to how to deal with it.

Also, many of the bots will have a standard set of openings they play most often, both as White and Black, so they can be useful when you're trying to get familiar with a new opening so you can gain some experience with the resulting middle game positions. The risk is that you get into the habit of just memorizing the opening lines and don't really understand why the line is as it is.

Human opponents will often play moves that deviate from book much earlier than some of the bots, particularly if you play an opening your opponent is not familiar with. And so while you might recognize a move as "that's not what they are supposed to play", you still have to figure out why it's wrong, or is it just sub-optimal (or maybe it is a line you're unfamiliar with). In any of those cases, much of the "bot play" experience goes out the window as you're now on your own.

Basically, there are ways to use bots effectively. Remember, you're not under time pressure with the bots so learn to use that time to practice reading the board and blunder checking. There's no loss of rating, so practice your calculations and if you think you see a really fantastic combination, and you really can't find anything wrong with it, then go for it. If it works, wonderful, and if it doesn't, finding out what you missed is a good learning experience - and it all came at no cost to you (rating wise at least).

I PLAYED WITH ADVANCED BOTS FOR 7 DAYS CONSICUTIVELY, AND FOUGHT THEM ALL, NOW WHEN I STARTED PLAYING WITH REAL PLAYERS MY RATING DROPPED BY 135. LET ME TELL YOU ALL THE BOTS ARE 3 STAR COVERED.SO MY ANS IS DON'T. AT YOUR RATING DIFFERENT PLAYERS BEHAVE DIFFERENTLY TRY TACKLING THEM ON YOUR OWN WITH REAL PLAYERS. IN SHORT PLAYING WITH BOTS IS A MALPRACTICE.

Play against people, not bots. Bots dont play like humans and they are not going to train you properly.

Engines are good to run post game analysis on your matches. Get Stockfish for free, and some free GUI, such as ScidVsPc, or chessbase if you have the money, and then go through your games with the help of the engine.

But if you still want to play "bots", dont play against gimped bots which will artificially go random mistakes. Play the engine at its full strength. Much better practice than a bot which will hang the queen on purpose on move 10.

"I had the opposite experience—my rating increased, but I’ve already played through all the bots up to the Masters level. Playing against bots helped me spot blunders more easily when facing lower-rated players." Maybe try playing each bots starting from beginners up to your level and move on after beating each one at least 10 times (in a row if you can) .. that's what I did.

Bots are ultimately very predictable and need a specific style of play.

Basically they are programmed to blunder sooner or later.

Very much unlike human opponents who may do all kinds of weird stuff, and dont blunder on purpose, i.e. its much harder to spot.

Fun example from my own games: I had done the worst opening ever and made an absolutely collossal error on move 7:

Except my opponent didnt saw it (either).

Nice 👍

Great

I agree! the weakness of playing against bots, is that each character plays a progammative way. but if you are learning a new opening and want to get used to common main line attacks, the bot will play those positions. Each character plays mostly the main lines, so it is not super deep training but it is a fun way to explore and apply a new opening.

I think itt is a fun way to play chess

To me all the easy/intermediate bots aren't worth playing but 2000+ bots are. You play a couple of matches and lose and then you get to see what patterns are making you suffer and how to add variety to your openings. You can tweak some settings and have them play with time constraints, so you can test out your ability to think quickly and on your feet too! I wouldn't worry about the crowns n stuff and filling them in, but they're good practice if you don't have that many other options.

Yes, but understand humans will play at 300 to 500 elo more then bot, so 1,000 elo bot is about 700 elo strength of a human counterpart, so if you want to beat 1000 human elo you need to regularly beat 1300 bot...