How to beat Elena
Elena is a intermediate bot on Chess.com, listed at 1200. Here is what the games look like, what usually goes wrong, and how to see exactly where yours did.
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How Elena plays
Elena is a steadier intermediate bot: reasonable openings, few outright blunders, and a habit of punishing loose pieces. Reviews of losses to Elena tend to show a slow drift rather than one disaster — several inaccuracies in the opening and middlegame that add up to a lost endgame.
The plan
Play the opening you know, castle early, and trade only when it improves your position. Against Elena the game is won by making fewer small mistakes, not by finding a brilliancy.
Review the game you just lost
Bot games on Chess.com have their own address once they are finished: chess.com/game/computer/…. Type rv in front of it — rvchess.com/game/computer/… — and the full review builds itself: accuracy for both sides, every move labelled, and a graph you can click to jump to the moment the game turned. It is free, needs no account, and does not count against Chess.com's daily Game Review.
If you cannot find the address, paste the game's PGN instead. Chess.com's Game Review is limited for free members, so this is also the way to review every bot game rather than one a day.
Which move to look at
Against a intermediate bot the useful move is rarely the last one. Open the review, find the first place the graph tips against you, and ask what Elena was threatening there. That is the pattern to fix; the final blunder is just where it showed up.
Bot strengths are as Chess.com listed them at the time of writing; the site re-rates and adds bots. This site is not affiliated with Chess.com.