A New Personal Highest Rating for Blitz Chess

Greetings,

As I mentioned in my previous blog entry, I am addicted to online blitz chess.  One great thing about lichess.org is that it calculates your rating (assuming you select to play a rated game instead of a casual game).  Lichess calculates your rating for each type of time control (bullet, blitz, rapid, etc.) and all new users get a provisional rating of 1500.  A rating of 1500, for the most part, is the around median rating for all chess players (FYI, there are almost 200,000 users with a blitz rating on lichess).

Lichess uses what is called the Glicko-2 method for calculating (the successor to the Glicko rating system).  The math is quite complicated.  For the most part, if you win or lost against an opponent with the same rating (at least for where I am rated), your rating goes up (or down) about 10 points.  Losing to a lower rated opponent will cost you more while winning against a higher opponent will gain you more.  Lichess appears to find you a player with a similar rating whenever you select to play against a random opponent.

As of the moment of this blog post, I have a blitz rating of 1487 which is a new personal high for me.  I had reached 1485 twice (once in August and again 2 weeks ago).  My rating fluctuates quite a bit as you can see from my blitz stats chart below.

I seem to do OK for a while and then hit a losing streak.  I have dipped below 1400 quite a few times over the past few months only to rebound.  I am not sure why but I have a feeling that the gambits and defenses that I use work great against 1300 rated players and not so well against 1500 rated players.  Once I get into the 1400s lichess puts me up against better players and I am lost.  This is the main reason that I started my database of my openings so I could see if I needed to study on how to play against some opening method (I do struggle against the Sicilian Defense, I do not need my database to tell me this).

Anyway, today I am on a high so I thought I would blog about it.  As the chart indicates, the lower 1300s awaits me soon enough.

Jon

Chess Statistics

Greetings,

It has been a while since I wrote a real blog post.  There are several reasons but one big one is my serious addiction to online chess (hey, as I point out to my wife often, there are WORSE things a fellow can be addicted to on the internet!).  I started playing on https://lichess.org around the April (2018) time frame and have played over 3,000 games since that time.

The lichess site allows you to play several varieties of chess other than just the standard rules but I have almost exclusively played normal chess.  The site also allows you to set time limits for a game, some of which are just crazy (30 seconds to complete a whole game!).  For the most part I have been playing with a time control called "blitz".  There are a few definitions for blitz depending on where you play chess but the lichess site says that anything between 3 and 8 minutes per side falls in the blitz category.  The majority of my games are what is called 5+0 which means that each side gets 5 minutes to complete their moves and you add 0 seconds per move (incremental time).  I won't bog you down with any more details.

Since you can download your game results and details, I started importing them into an database (of course!).  The data contains what is called an ECO code which categorizes the type of game, mostly based on the first few moves.  These openings get their names from where they were first played (French Defense, Vienna Game) to the pieces used (King's Gambit, Four Knights Game) to the person's who first used and perfected the opening (Ruy Lopez, Caro-Kann Defense).  There are a limited number of ECO codes (A00-A99, B00-B99, C00-C99, D00-D99, E00-E99) so some openings share a code as they are just a variation on a theme.  OK, enough about that, let's get to the chess stats.

While the download contains the ECO code, it does not tell you the variation so I had to do some legwork.  I first started by figuring out how many different opening combinations there were.  I just used the first 4 moves (2 by white, 2 by black) and found that there were over 400 different combinations.  I think looked up all the ECO Codes and ECO Descriptions (the name of the opening).  Still not satisfied I considered the first 6 moves (3 by white, 3 by black) and found that of the 3,000+ games I had played, there were over 1,000 distinct openings (no wonder chess is so hard to master).  Once I had imported them into my database, we were in business.  I plan on making a few postings about chess so let me start with just the games from April through June.  If I also filter for only blitz games that were rated (more on that in another post), there are ~400 games.

Color	Win	Loss	Draw	Total
White	84	103	12	199
Black	101	104	15	220
Total	185	207	27	419

Not a great start I will admit.  If I add in the ECO code and description then the table would quickly explode to 100 rows so I will just include a few of the more common openings.

White	Win	Loss	Draw	Total
C30 King's Gambit	10	11	3	24
C34 King's Gambit Accepted: MacLeod Defense	11	8	1	20
C34 King's Gambit Accepted: Fischer Defense	4	11		15
B30 Sicilian Defense: Old Sicilian	3	7	3	13
B50 Sicilian Defense	6	6	1	13
C30 King's Gambit Declined: Queen's Knight Defense	6	5	1	12
B01 Scandinavian Defense: Mieses-Kotroc Variation	5	5		10

I like playing the King's Gambit opening but it does require your opponent to make a certain move with their first move.  I do not like it when my opponent plays the Sicilian Defense against me but I just need to study more on that opening and how to play against it.

Black	Win	Loss	Draw	Grand Total
C41 Philidor's Defense	30	26	4	60
A40 Queen's Pawn	10	9	4	23
B12 Caro-Kann Defense	9	9		18
A00 Van't Kruijs Opening	9	3	2	14
A41 Queen's Pawn Game: Anglo-Slav Opening	7	6	1	14

As black I really struggled until I discovered Philidor's Defense (more on that in a future blog I would guess).  Let me know if you ever want to challenge me to a game.

Jon

GOOD DAY

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