Who Is Alex Jampier Silvestre?
Alex Jampier Silvestre, known on the board as alextj, is a chess player with two very different souls. One soul is patient, methodical, and happiest grinding out a long Daily game over the course of a day or two. The other soul once played 529 Blitz games in a single month and thought that was a reasonable way to spend October. Both souls belong to the same person, and both have produced a career worth reading about.
His preferred time control is Daily, and the numbers back that up: in his Daily games he has spent an average of more than eighty moves per win, which means he is not the sort of player who blitzes out a mating net and runs away. He is the sort who waits, improves the position, and lets the opponent's patience fail first.
Origins: The Great Blitz Binge
Alex's recorded history opens in 2012 with a mix of Rapid and Blitz games and a quick education in how fast a clock can run out. By 2013 he had discovered volume. In October of that year alone he played 529 Blitz games, winning 185, losing 304, and drawing 40, which works out to something like seventeen games a day. September was nearly as busy with 310 games, and August added 193. Somewhere in that pile of games a player was being built, one lost pawn at a time.
Along the way he established a personal record nobody wants: a losing streak of 64 games. He has, to his credit, also strung together 14 straight wins, so the graph has both mountains and mineshafts.
Head Scratching Opening Choices
Alex is not a player who wants to play the same position twenty times in a row. His repertoire reads like a tourism brochure for unusual openings:
- Caro-Kann Defense: his most trusted black setup in Blitz, and a reliable workhorse across every time control.
- Sicilian Defense: Closed: his single most played opening in Blitz with 638 games, which is a lot of quiet maneuvering for someone with this much energy.
- Australian Defense and Czech Defense: suspicious choices that he keeps making anyway.
- Amar Gambit: 220 Blitz games and a 32 percent win rate, which is exactly the sort of result that should end a love affair and has not.
- Hungarian Opening: Wiedenhagen-Beta Gambit and the Colle System's Rhamphorhynchus Variation, two names that sound like extinct sea creatures and occasionally play like them.
He has also given the London System serious screen time, a decision that has been quietly judged by everyone.
The Season to Forget: 2018
Every career has a chapter that should be stapled shut. For Alex that chapter is 2018, a year in which he played 86 games, won four, lost 81, and drew one. His average decisive game lasted about 18 moves, which is roughly the amount of time it takes to make a sandwich. He opened with 1.d3 in 29 games. His offensive output that year was 40 checks across 86 games, or about half a check per game, a statistic that suggests the pieces were not so much attacking as commuting.
Then he went quiet for three years. Sometimes the best improvement plan is a long walk.
The Rivalry Files
Chess is better with a nemesis, and Alex has several. The most frequent visitor to his board is Christian Silvestre, who has locked horns with him 280 times. The scoreline of 60 wins, 183 losses, and 37 draws suggests one side of that rivalry has been enjoying itself more than the other. Close behind is luisito_69 with 201 games and an even bleaker ledger for Alex, 42 wins and 145 losses.
Relief arrives when vyktor15 shows up. Across 60 games Alex holds a 32 to 26 edge with two draws, proof that the universe occasionally balances its books. The trio of christian-silvestre, luisito_69, and vyktor15 makes up a substantial fraction of his life in chess, and there is something admirable about returning, again and again, to the people who beat you.
The Rebuild and the Long Climb
Something clicked after the quiet years. The comeback statistics are remarkable: Alex recovers from a lost piece in roughly 89 percent of such games, a number that should not be possible and yet keeps showing up. His endgame frequency sits above 78 percent, meaning most of his games survive long enough for someone to have to actually know how to play chess. He wins half his games when he is the first to give check, and only about 37 percent when the opponent gets there first, which is a tidy argument for seizing the initiative.
The climb shows up clearly in his Blitz record, where he has logged thousands of games and pushed his rating into territory that would have seemed absurd in 2013.
Habits of a Night Owl
Alex does his best work at 2:00 in the morning, according to his own results, which tells you something about his relationship with sleep. His tilt factor is 64 out of 100, a middling score suggesting he gets annoyed by a bad game but rarely sets anything on fire. He has drawn 71 games by stalemate, which is either an impressive defensive resource or a sign that both players were very tired.
He also wins by timeout 900 times compared with 658 losses, a margin that suggests his Daily discipline pays off in the most mundane way possible. And he resigns about as often as he benefits from a resignation, 1,509 to 1,504, which is the statistical definition of a fair fight.
What Comes Next
Alex Jampier Silvestre is a player of huge volume, odd openings, and stubborn persistence. He has lost more games than most people will ever play, and he has come back from every one of them. If history is any guide, the next few thousand games will feature a Caro-Kann, at least one inexplicable Australian Defense, and a very long endgame played at two in the morning.