Chess Stats
I've been playing a lot of chess lately, mainly on Chess.com. It provides some great statistics and analyses of your games, but the features are limited unless you pay them money. I'd love to see the extended statistics, but I'm not interested right now in a subscription. In fact, I hate all subscription models, and avoid them like the plague. (But, I do understand that the developers need to eat.) Anyway, that's a different story. Here, I'm talking about the game of Chess.
Game Speeds
An entire game of chess is played on the duration of your chess clock plus your opponent's chess clock. Chess.com offers 4 different "game speeds" as follows.
| Type | Speed |
|---|---|
| Daily | 1 day+ |
| Rapid | 10-30 minutes |
| Blitz | 3-5 minutes |
| Bullet | 1-2 minutes |
One speed is not necessarily "harder" than any other - both sides have the exact same time to make their moves and is always completely fair (except white/black is chosen at random.) To me, that's one nice but incredubly frustrating part of chess - the game is so fair, that if you lose, it's all your fault.
I have a notable preference towards blitz style games. I used to play 5-minute games, but now I exclusively play 3-minute games. Each player has 3 minutes to make all their moves of the game, which means a game can last up to 6 minutes. How long do you have to make each move? For a 50-turn game of chess, with each turn divided up into even time segments...
...each player can only spend 3.6 seconds thinking of their moves on average. However, they get an "additional" 3.6 seconds to think on their opponent's time.
Free Stats
According to my free-version-statistics on Chess.com, I have played 1039 blitz games in the past 90 days. That is about 11-12 games per day on average. 507 games won (49%), 503 games lost (48%), and 29 games drawn (3%). 522 games were played with white, and 517 with black (about 50% each.) My rating started at 816, peaked at 904, and is currently at 797 (I was at 864, but then just lost a bunch of games while playing sleep-deprived.)
With the extended stats, I could see a deeper dive into a percentage of how games were won/lost/drawn (e.g. by resignation, checkmate, stalemate, timeout, etc...) One statistic I am particularly interested right now at least, is move accuracy by time of day. For example, do I play better in the morning, afternoon, evening, or night? I would assume evening, maybe afternoon, but I'm not sure. Also, the extended statistics shows a world map of statistics by country played against. I'm curious how many countries I've ever even played against. Have I played them all?
Openings
Without the extended analysis, I know that my favorite opening is the Ruy Lopez opening for white. For black, it depends. If e4 is played, I'll almost always respond with e5. Then if king's knight is developed, I'll either develop my kingside knight (via Nf6) or play d6. Stockfish (Chess.com's analysis bot) seems to think that Nf6 is better between the two, but developing the queenside knight with Nc6 is the best move for black here.
With Nf6, I can continue Petrov's defense if white takes my e5 pawn and eventually win back e4. If white plays something else, like Nc3, I'll usually end up playing Bb4 here, or else d6. I think my opening game is fairly strong and well-thought, but once I get to the middle or endgame, I really struggle and make the most embarassing blunders. However, I was able to perform a smothered mate in one of my games recently and it is my proudest achievement.
If I play black and white opens with d4, I'll usually play d5 and then start winging it. White's common follow-up move c4 is very frustrating to deal with. I usually respond with e3 but it really messes up my side of the board. I'll only take the c4 pawn if absolutely forced or if white moves the light squared bishop. I need to put more thought into this line.
My Chess.com profile is linked in the footer on every page on this website, in case anyone wants to send me a challenge!