When you are matched against a bot, the opponent is labelled as a bot on the versus screen, in the match view and in the match record. Bots have generated names and a visible bot marker. We do not disguise automated opponents with human-looking names to inflate the sense of a busy community.

• When you explicitly ask for a bot match and pick a difficulty.
• When a queue cannot find a human opponent within its timeout and you accept the bot fallback.

A bot opponent is created as a real player row flagged as a bot, so the match satisfies the same integrity rules as any other, but the match is marked as not ranked-eligible. The rating service is never called for it. There is no path, hidden or otherwise, by which a bot match changes your rating or your tier.

Difficulty levels change how the bot searches the position — easy plays near-randomly, normal plays reasonable moves, hard looks ahead for immediate wins and blocks, and expert plays the strongest line available to it. The bot does not cheat by reading your inputs ahead of time or by being granted extra moves.

Bot matches are recorded in your match history with their mode, so you can always tell which results came from human opponents. They are excluded from ranked leaderboards and from any competitive rating display.