Daniel Evelio Saiz Rodríguez FM

What’s going well

You show strong comfort in dynamic, tactical blitz positions and you can convert pressure into tangible advantages. Your opening choices—especially sharp Sicilian lines—often lead to interesting middlegames where you stay active and keep pieces on the board. Over the longer horizon, your rating trend indicates steady growth and increasing consistency, even if a single recent month softened a bit. This suggests you’re building solid patterns and pattern recognition that can translate into more automatic, correct choices under time pressure.

• You navigate aggressive openings with good piece activity and keep pressure on your opponent.
• In tricky middlegames, you find practical chances and create work for the opponent to solve under time pressure.
• You show resilience across longer sessions, which is valuable in blitz where time is always tight.

Areas to improve

• Time management in the early to middlegame phase: aim to firm up your plan by roughly move 15–20 and avoid spending too long on speculative lines under the clock. Practice targeted, fast decision-making in common structures you face.
• Calculation discipline in sharp positions: identify one to two candidate continuations and verify them, instead of chasing multiple tactical ideas. This helps reduce missteps when seconds are ticking.
• Endgame technique: strengthen rook endings and simple king-and-pawn endings. In blitz, being crisp in the endgame can turn near-equal positions into decisive results.
• Blunder awareness under time pressure: adopt a quick pre-m Move checklist (check for threats, ensure you’re not blundering a piece, assess king safety) to catch tactical pitfalls before committing.

Opening performance insights and plan

Your openings show solid to strong results overall, with several lines performing notably well in blitz. Highlights include:

• Sicilian Defense: Closed — a reliable, aggressive option that generates active play, with a strong win rate across many games.
• Sicilian Defense: Taimanov Variation, American Attack — another dynamic setup that produces rich tactical chances when you’re comfortable calculating quickly.
• Amazon Attack variants — you tend to get active play and practical chances in the middlegame.
• French Defense: Exchange Variation — this line has shown excellent practical results when you steer into solid hold-the-center plans.

Strategic plan: lean into 2–3 openings where you feel most confident and continue deepening the typical middlegame plans (typical pawn structures, piece maneuvers, and common tactical motifs) so you can blurt out strong plans under time pressure. For lines with historically lower win rates (e.g., some Alapin setups), keep them as backup options when you’re feeling the need for quieter, more solid play or when facing a known opponent who struggles against them.

Rating trends and training plan

The longer-term rating trajectory is positive, with noticeable gains over 6 and 12 months, indicating growing experience and consistency. A minor setback in the most recent month is a natural blip in blitz; the overall trend remains upward, which is what you should aim to keep building on.

To accelerate improvement, try a focused, sustainable weekly routine:

• 2–3 short training blocks (30–45 minutes each) focused on one area per block: tactics, endgames, or opening study.
• Daily 5–10 minute blitz puzzle session to reinforce pattern recognition.
• 2 dedicated opening sessions per week to deepen your top lines and build reliable plans.
• After each blitz session, write down 3 key mistakes and 1 concrete improvement to reinforce learning.

Concrete next steps

• Establish a tight two-opening repertoire for blitz (for example: Sicilian Closed as White’s main, plus English Four Knights as White’s secondary; for Black, a reliable Sicilian line such as Taimanov American Attack and a solid French/Caro-Kann back-up). Deepen the typical middlegame plans for these lines so you can play faster and more confidently.
• Implement a daily tactical drill: 5–10 minutes of puzzles focused on motifs you’ve encountered in your recent blitz games (forks, pins, discovered checks, and piece coordination).
• Practice time-management drills: in every practice blitz, set a target to complete the opening phase by move 15 and consciously reduce time spent on non-critical variations in those first 15 moves.
• Endgame focus: dedicate a couple of sessions to rook endings and king-and-pawn endings. Learn a few standard “techniques” (distance king activity, rook activity rules, and opposition in pawn endgames) so you can convert more drawn or near-drawn endings.
• Post-game review habit: for each Blitz session, review 2–3 games with the goal of extracting a single practical improvement per game (e.g., “avoid passive setups after 15th move,” or “prefer proactive pawn breaks in this structure”).