John Bath (Buckeye22): National Master of the Blitz Board
John Bath, known to every fast-fingered opponent as Buckeye22, is a National Master with a blitz habit that would alarm a reasonable person: more than 15,000 rated games, most of them fast, and a loyalty to the Caro-Kann Defense that borders on a real estate investment. The username implies Ohio State fandom, and the play style implies a man who picked his openings decades ago and sees no reason to renegotiate. His preferred battleground is blitz, where he has amassed over 2,700 games and pushed his ceiling to 2132 (2026-05-23).
The Caro-Kann Embassy
As Black, John has played 1,527 bullet games with the Caro-Kann and 666 more with its Exchange Variation. At that volume, the Caro-Kann is not an opening choice, it is a mailing address. When rivals try to avoid it with the London System, he reaches for the Poisoned Pawn Variation and opens negotiations over b2. Against 1.d4 he answers with the Slav Defense, often facing his own favorite structures from the other side of the table.
As White, he is a 1.d4 lifer: 1,595 d4 openers in 2025 alone, twelve games of 1.b3, and a lonely five games of 1.e4, which look less like flexibility and more like a lost bet. The Queen's Gambit Declined complex is his home turf, and the Australian Defense (637 bullet games, a 54% win rate) remains his most mysterious weapon, presumably reserved for opponents who traveled a long way.
A typical start to a Buckeye22 evening:
The Nemesis File
Every grinder has a rival. Aja Sampath has met Buckeye22 on 108 occasions and holds a 78 win, 11 loss, 19 draw edge, a head to head that stopped being a rivalry somewhere around game 40 and became a subscription. On the sunny side of the ledger sits Roy Dotson, who has generously supplied 23 wins against just 1 loss and 3 draws, essentially a recurring deposit of confidence.
How He Wins (Slowly, Then All at Once)
John's wins average over 70 moves. He is not winning so much as gradually converting you. Roughly three quarters of his games visit the endgame, where he grinds like premium coffee, and he resigns early in fewer than half of his games. Down material? He fights back in 82.5% of those games, wins nearly half of them anyway, and blames nothing on anybody. His tilt factor is a cool 12, and only 1.5% of his losses are one sided blowouts.
- Endgame frequency: 75% of games, and he likes it that way
- Comeback rate: 82.5%, the optimism of a golden retriever
- Longest winning streak: 16 games; longest losing streak: a merely 12 game character building exercise
- Most common checking piece: the queen, wielded 10,909 times and counting
- Checkmate wins: 47, because most opponents resign out of respect long before that point
The Long Way Around
John's blitz account debuted in January 2014 with a win at 1336, followed by a four year sabbatical. He surfaced briefly in 2018 (two games, two wins, a flawless cameo), then returned for good in 2020 when the world suddenly had free time and he had an audience for his Slav. The climb since then has been steady rather than flashy: over a decade of grinding, a 16 game heater, and finally National Master hardware to show for it. The chart tells the story better than anyone.
Buckeye Fact File
- Peak efficiency award: his bullet peak was set in May 2021, a month with exactly one bullet game, which he won
- Best hour of the day: 9:00 AM, a 56% win rate, when most of us are still choosing a username
- Worst day: Saturday, the week's lowest win rate, presumably because football is on
- Daily chess weapon: the Old Indian Defense, an 87.5% win rate delivered at the speed of a fax machine
- Average first capture: move 6, the patience of a man who owns two clocks and ignores both
- Slowest weekend activity: losing, because Saturdays already belong to something else
In short: a National Master who plays fast, grinds slow, and has never met a drawn out endgame he didn't want to squeeze for another forty moves. If your clock says three minutes and your position says Caro-Kann, you already know who found you.