Antonie Schalij (AntonieSch09): The Bullet Specialist
Antonie Schalij, who plays online under the handle AntonieSch09, is the sort of chess player who treats a clock the way a drummer treats a metronome: the faster the tempo, the happier he looks. Since his first rated games in 2023, Antonie has piled up close to 4,850 finished games across daily, rapid, blitz and bullet, with the fastest formats absorbing the largest share of his evenings. His rating curve reads like a staircase built by someone in a hurry, climbing from a beginner's three digits to a peak rapid rating of 1602 and a bullet peak of 1542 (2026-10-20). This is a player who would rather lose gloriously in ninety seconds than think quietly for three days.
Bullet Is Home
If you need to find Antonie Schalij on a given night, look in the bullet pool. Roughly 1,735 of his recorded games are bullet, producing 913 wins, 746 losses and 76 draws, and his bullet rating has travelled from a humble 100 all the way to the 1500s. The pattern repeats every month: dozens of games, a long grind upward, a small correction, then another climb. The clock is not his enemy. Across all formats he has won 1,038 games on time, which is more than he has won by checkmate, and his opponents have learned that a comfortable position against AntonieSch09 is not the same thing as a finished game.
His blitz record is almost as busy, with more than 2,200 games played and a peak of 1584, while rapid remains his most polished format: 405 wins against 238 losses and a peak rating of 1602 in late October 2026.
Opening Repertoire: Scandinavia First, Questions Later
Every player has a comfort blanket, and Antonie's is the Scandinavian Defense. He has faced it 164 times in blitz with a 62.8 percent win rate, 147 times in bullet at 53.7 percent, and 36 times in rapid at a startling 80.6 percent. When the position suits him, the early queen sortie is less a provocation and more a starter pistol.
The rest of the repertoire is a grab bag of sharp, slightly mischievous choices. The Caro-Kann Defense is his most frequent battleground and gives mixed results, the Sicilian Defense: Alapin Variation appears in hundreds of games, and the Czech Defense and the wonderfully named Dresden Opening: The Goblin both sit comfortably above 50 percent in bullet. He is not a player who wins by memorising twenty moves of theory. He wins by making the position weird and then navigating the weirdness faster than you can.
A Taste for Traps
The Blackburne Shilling Gambit shows up 84 times in blitz and 56 times in bullet, and Antonie's quick-play score with it in rapid is a healthy 72.7 percent. He also dabbles in the Amar Gambit, the Elephant Gambit and the Barnes Opening: Walkerling, where he is a perfect five wins from five in daily chess. This is a player who enjoys the moment an opponent realises the quiet knight move was not quiet at all.
The classic trap line he plays for, shown here as an illustration rather than a specific game:
Rivals, Nemeses and Friendly Strangers
No online chess biography is complete without the grudges, and Antonie Schalij has a proper one. Against Jan van der Linden he has played 78 games and managed only 11 wins, 63 losses and 4 draws. That is not a rivalry, that is a recurring subscription. A similar story unfolds with Laurens Roelofs, where a single win sits next to 16 defeats. Some opponents simply have his number.
Happily, the ledger also has happier columns. gep09 has been the best kind of sparring partner across 68 games, with Antonie ahead 43 to 22, while willemarije has been swept aside 19 wins to 1 loss. He is 17-3-2 against han_van_dijk23 and even holds a 6-2 edge over an account called coach-levy, which is either a coach or a beautifully optimistic username. Against lower-rated opposition he converts 83.8 percent of the time, which suggests the ratings climb is not luck.
Playing Style: Long Games, Late Escapes
AntonieSch09 is quietly a marathon man. Around 77 percent of his games reach an endgame, his average win takes roughly 68 moves, and his average loss drags on for 79. He is also stubborn to a fault: his comeback rate sits above 84 percent, and he still scores nearly 50 percent in games where he has already dropped a piece. Heavy one-sided defeats are rare, which tells you he rarely collapses.
His first move is essentially a foregone conclusion. In 2026 alone he opened with e4 more than 2,300 times, against 47 outings for d4 and a grand total of four experiments with everything else combined.
Milestones and Progression
The trajectory is the story here. In April 2023 his rapid rating was three digits and his results were two losses from two games. By October 2026 he had four separate peaks above 1500 in daily, blitz, rapid and bullet. His longest winning streak reached 11 games, though a nine-game losing skid also found its way into the record books, presumably on a Tuesday.
Quirks of the Clock
- Night owl bonus: his best recorded hour is 23:00, where he has never lost a game. Sample size small, confidence enormous.
- Sunday form: Sunday is his strongest day at 57.8 percent, so weekend Antonie is the version to fear.
- Timeout habit: 1,038 wins by flag against 461 losses. He is a persistent scavenger of other people's clocks.
- Checks: his queen delivers more checks than any other piece, over 3,900 of them, which fits the sharp, provocation-first style.
- Endgame appetite: for a bullet specialist, he is oddly willing to play the technical phase, and often wins it.
Antonie Schalij is still early in his chess life, but the shape of him is clear: a fast-moving, trap-loving, endgame-tolerant competitor whose rating has a habit of making large jumps when nobody is looking. If the pattern holds, the next four-digit milestone is just a matter of one more late-night bullet session.