The Chess Campaign - Coach Mae (800)

[Part of the Chess Campaign]

Instead of sleeping all the time I thought I'd occasionally practice on my daily commute but since chess.com relies on an app for phone games and doesn't load on the browser (and I hate downloading apps), I've instead found this other chess site that still lets me play on the browser. Lichess!

There are no AI "people" on this site, just a cold hard level number between one and eight for something called Stockfish. I beat Stockfish level 1, 2 and 3 (got massacred by level 4) then back at a PC I decided to challenge Martin's "tougher" alter-ego Mighty Martin (500) and won! YESSSSSS! Then just for good measure I beat AI Coach Mae (800) as well! Then I tried playing against the new(?) AI dog bots and lost easily. Woof woof.

Against Coach Mae I think I needed 2-3 pawn promotions to queens (because I still keep losing my queens) before I can checkmate which is not a great statistic. Also, I'm getting to 51 moves now against Larry Jr. (1250) but I feel that I am still nowhere close to winning and interestingly, each level of Stockfish is equivalent to +300 on chess.com which means Stockfish level 4 which also is regularly beating me might just be Larry Jr. in disguise or vice versa!? All my reading on chess for novices didn't give any clues, but just reinforced that chess is all about mating. :P

Interestingly the 400 rating chess.com generously gave me as a "new to chess" account hasn't moved at all. I guess it just doesn't get affected by any games against AI. According to the forums, the technique to beating the AI is to practice against people which is super counter intuitive but OK, I guess I'll just have to play against real people instead.