How to beat Noam

Noam is a master bot on Chess.com, listed at 2200. Here is what the games look like, what usually goes wrong, and how to see exactly where yours did.

Updated

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How Noam plays

Noam is one of the master-level bots. Beating him is a real achievement at any club rating, and losing to him is expected. What a review is for here is different: not "where did I blunder" but "where did the evaluation first tip", which against a master bot is usually a quiet positional concession ten moves before anything was lost.

The plan

Play your most solid opening, avoid unforced trades, and look at the review for the first inaccuracy rather than the first blunder. That is the move to study.

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 master bot the useful move is rarely the last one. Open the review, find the first place the graph tips against you, and ask what Noam 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.

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