How to beat Wally
Wally is a advanced bot on Chess.com, listed at 1800. Here is what the games look like, what usually goes wrong, and how to see exactly where yours did.
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How Wally plays
Wally is a genuinely strong opponent for most club players, and players who beat him at 800–900 online rating tend to be playing much slower than they would against a human. Reviews of losses to Wally show tactical oversights rather than strategic ones: a fork, a pin, a back-rank weakness that was there for several moves.
The plan
Treat every game against Wally as a tactics exercise. Before each move, name his most dangerous reply. The review will tell you which of those you missed and how many moves it had been available.
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 advanced bot the useful move is rarely the last one. Open the review, find the first place the graph tips against you, and ask what Wally 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.