Who Is Francesco Sonis?
Francesco Sonis, known across the online chess world as FrancyGM, is a FIDE Grandmaster and one of the most relentlessly active blitz players you will ever run into at 2 a.m. If you have queued for a fast game and been paired with a polite-looking Italian account that immediately plays something strange on move two, there is a decent chance it was him.
Sonis is not a player who dabbles. His profile reads like a construction site: tens of thousands of games, a win column that would fill a phone book, and a rating curve that goes up so sharply it looks like a typo. He is a blitz specialist first and foremost, with a serious bullet habit on the side, and a curious, almost experimental relationship with the daily and rapid pools that he visits occasionally, like a man checking whether the lights are still on.
The Blitz Grind
The headline number is the volume. Roughly 43,000 blitz games sit in his record, with more than 22,000 wins, and that is before you count the bullet and rapid columns. Peak blitz rating: 3140 (2026-07-21), reached in the summer of 2026, which places him firmly in the superhuman tier of online speed chess.
What makes the climb more impressive is where it started. In 2014 he was a 1,600 level blitz player, losing as often as he won. By 2017 he was past 2,400. By 2019 he was knocking on 2,800. Somewhere in there a switch flipped, and it never flipped back. The chart is less a progression and more a staircase built by someone in a hurry.
- Best day of the week: Tuesday, at a 53.65 percent win rate.
- Best hour of the day: 2 a.m., where his win rate climbs to nearly 60 percent.
- Worst hour: 7 a.m., where he is merely mortal at 49.9 percent.
- Average game length in his wins: about 84 moves, which is long for a blitz player and suggests he is happy to outplay people slowly.
That last point is the sneaky one. An endgame appears in over 80 percent of his games, which is unusual for someone with this much speed chess on the clock. Sonis is not just a flagging merchant. He grinds, he squeezes, and he converts.
The Opening Laboratory
Ask a normal grandmaster what they play and you get a curated answer. Ask Sonis and you get a shrug, a grin, and 1,624 games of the Caro-Kann Defense. He has played it from both colours, with a 53.5 percent overall score, and it is comfortably his most frequent guest at the board.
Then things get weird, in the best way. The "Amazon Attack: Siberian Attack" appears over a thousand times, the Modern Defense shows up more than 900, and the Sicilian Defense Najdorf has been tested in over 700 games. He also has a well-documented soft spot for the Blackburne Shilling Gambit, which tells you everything about his sense of humour and very little about his sense of self-preservation.
There are lines in his repertoire most players would need a search engine to name: the Dory Defense, the Australian Defense, the Diemer-Duhm Gambit, assorted poisoned pawns, and a London variation that apparently required redaction. He is a tinkerer by temperament. When a novelty fails, he plays it again next week to check.
- Sharp openings: check.
- Dubious gambits: check.
- One quiet positional system played 400 times to prove a point: also check.
The Rivalries
Play as much as Sonis does and you build a cast of regulars. Nobody has shared more boards with him than Murad İbrahimli, a rivalry spanning 284 games that Sonis leads narrowly, 132 to 122 with 30 draws. It is the online chess equivalent of two neighbours who have argued about the same fence for a decade.
Anton Demchenko is next on the dance card with 227 meetings and a similarly tight 107 to 99 edge. Then there are the thornier names. Daniel Naroditsky has been a genuine problem, winning 73 of their 118 encounters, and Rudik Makarian is not far behind. Every dominant online player needs a nemesis or two, and Sonis has quietly collected a small set.
Style, Quirks, and the 2 a.m. Problem
Statistically, Sonis is a fighter. His comeback rate sits above 90 percent, and even after dropping a piece his win rate stays north of 50 percent. He is also extremely reluctant to resign early, which makes him annoying in exactly the way you want a competitor to be.
His checking habits are worth a mention: over his career he has delivered more than 107,000 checks, and the rook is his favourite weapon by a wide margin. He is first to give check in only about 46 percent of games, but when he does, he wins roughly 60 percent of the time. Read that as a warning: if the rook lands on your king's file early, the game is probably already over.
His white score of 54 percent against a 49.6 percent black score also suggests he has spent most of his life trying to prove something with the first move.
Where to Find Him
Sonis is a blitz player by preference, a bullet player by addiction, and a rapid player only when the mood strikes. He wins more than half of everything, laughs at theory, treats the Caro-Kann like a family heirloom, and is genuinely dangerous after midnight. If you see FrancyGM pop up in your pairing queue, take a breath, play something solid, and above all, do not let the rook off the leash.