Ferenc Pasztor FM

The Shepherd of Slow Wins

Some players win with fireworks. Ferenc Pasztor, known across the board as Csipi, wins with patience, a rook, and the slow certainty of continental drift. A FIDE Master whose surname translates to "shepherd" in Hungarian, he has spent more than fifteen years herding an enormous flock of blitz games toward the same destination: a long, grinding, deeply unsporting victory. The nickname chirps like a cartoon canary, and the style matches. He never stops pecking at the position.

Fifteen Years on the Blitz Highway

The career arc reads like a slow-burn novel. He was pushing 1950 within two months of his first login in April 2011, patrolled the 1900s for half a decade, cracked 2100 in late 2015, and has spent recent years knocking politely on the door of 2400. His peak blitz mark, 2388 (2026-10-03), was set in October 2026, twelve points short of the promised land and still somehow in sight.

Do the arithmetic and it gets better: nearly 40,000 blitz games since 2011 works out to roughly seven games a day, every day, weekends and birthdays included. The chart above is not a spike. It is a staircase built by someone who never learned to stop.

A Repertoire Carved from Granite

As White, Csipi plays 1.d4 with the loyalty of a family dog; 1.e4 has appeared roughly a dozen times in fifteen years, presumably to confuse historians. Against the King's Indian Defense he reaches for the Averbakh Variation and the rarer Kazakh setup, both scoring a shade over 50%. When opponents dare the Grünfeld Defense, he steers into his pet 5.Bg5 systems, good for a career-best 52.5%. The London System Poisoned Pawn and even the quirkily named Australian Defense make regular appearances.

As Black he answers 1.e4 with load-bearing masonry: the Caro-Kann Defense and the Petrov's Defense, the latter now past 3,200 appearances. Chess's most drawing opening, and he has squeezed 1,364 wins out of it anyway.

The Long Game

Csipi's wins are engineered rather than improvised. Roughly 86% of his games reach the endgame, his victories average 76 moves, and his comeback rate sits at a shameless 85.6%. Drop a piece to him and you have not won; you have simply started a longer game he still takes 41% of the time. He resigns early in only about 16% of defeats, draws fewer than one game in ten, and carries a tilt factor of 14, which is roughly the emotional temperature of a library. Most games end the way blitz games usually end: with the clock, quietly, doing the executioner's work.

Nemesis, and Everyone Else

Every long career needs a villain, and Csipi found his in Cseke Ricsi. Across 113 meetings the ledger reads 31 wins, 71 losses and 11 draws, which means somewhere out there is a player who has beaten a FIDE Master more than seventy times and definitely brings it up at parties. Elsewhere the news is cheerier: against RRUFEJA he leads 47-39, and Capricorn9 has donated 44 defeats against only 30 wins. Thousands of rematches against the same familiar faces is what the blitz community is actually made of.

Operating Hours: Midnight to Regret

The scouting report on when to face him is unusually specific. His win rate peaks at midnight (57%) and stays respectable through the late evening, then collapses to 20% around 3 AM, which suggests even granite needs sleep. Thursday is his best day of the week; Sunday is statistically the day to be brave. Challenge him after breakfast and you will do fine. Challenge him at dawn and even the chess gods will ask what you were thinking.

A Word on Bullet

Bullet chess and Csipi maintain a formal, distant relationship: one win, eight losses, career total. The lone victory, in October 2022, set his bullet peak of 2103, making it simultaneously the most efficient win of his life and the only bullet game worth framing. Rapid has been kinder in flashes: he surfaced at a 2334 peak in December 2020, promptly dropped fifteen games that month, and now visits the format about once a year, like a relative who waves from the car.

Csipi by the Numbers

• 39,859 blitz games since April 2011: roughly seven a day, every day, for over fifteen years.
• Longest winning streak: 25 games. Longest losing streak: only 14, proof that his storms pass quickly.
• Favorite checking piece: the rook, deployed 35,544 times. Subtlety is for other people.
• First capture typically lands on move 8; everything before that is positioning.
• Wins 62% of games against lower-rated opposition and still mugs higher-rated players 29% of the time.
• Strength-adjusted blitz win rate: 50.1%, essentially a coin flip against his true peers, which after 40,000 games feels less like a stat and more like destiny.

The Verdict

Is he the scariest attacker of his generation? No. Is he the person you want to face at move 60 with equal material and a wobbling clock? Absolutely not, and that is the entire business model. Ferenc Pasztor has built a two-decade career on outlasting people, one patient endgame at a time, and the shepherd is still counting his flock.