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