fsds01: The Marathoner of Blitz Chess
Some players study chess. Some players prepare for it. fsds01 plays it. The username looks like a keyboard warm-up drill, which is fitting, because the fingers behind it have apparently never stopped moving. Since first logging on in December 2017 with a blitz rating of 574, fsds01 has assembled more than 34,000 games of online chess, a body of work best described as cardio for the brain. The very first rapid outing was suspiciously perfect: seven games, seven wins, a leap from 919 to 1322 that briefly made the whole project look easy. It was not.
The Marathon Years
The formula has never changed: volume, then more volume. In 2020 fsds01 played over 7,000 blitz games. In 2021 the total reached 10,783, which works out to roughly 29 blitz games per day, every day, including the days everyone else took off. Somewhere inside that avalanche, results started arriving. Rapid chess crossed the 2000 mark in July 2022 with a two-game, two-win month that peaked at exactly 2001 before a sensible retreat, and the rapid peak eventually climbed to 2153 (2025-02-13) in February 2025.
Blitz remains the natural habitat. The blitz peak of 1948 (2023-08-04) landed in August 2023, famously parking 52 points short of a round number, a margin that surely visits someone at 3 a.m. The streak ledger reads like a grinder's diary: a personal-best 16-game winning run, offset by a 24-game losing streak that was survived, processed, and presumably avenged.
The French Defense Is a Lifestyle
As Black, there is one true faith: the French Defense. The Exchange French alone accounts for 2,115 blitz games of grim symmetry, the Advance Variation another 1,915 at just over 50 percent, and there is even a 299-game relationship with the gloriously named Guimard Variation, Thunderbunny line, which sounds like a cartoon and plays like a fortress.
Other defenses are occasionally tolerated. The Benoni appears 634 times in blitz, and opponents have repeatedly tried to derail things with the disrespectful Amar Gambit, starting 1.Nh3, roughly 400 times, with limited success and considerable audacity.
White and the Amazon Attack Menace
With the white pieces, the first move is 1.e4 with near-religious consistency, and the second move is often the Amazon Attack: 1.e4 e5 2.Qh5, deployed more than a thousand times in blitz. The books do not recommend this. The books have not been consulted. The queen goes up the board, the opponent gets nervous, and the game becomes a stress test.
There is discipline inside the mischief. Opponents wandering into the Barnes Defense with 1...f6 meet swift justice at a 57.9 percent win rate across 451 blitz games. The Blackburne Shilling Gambit has been accepted, survived, and catalogued 567 times. And in 2021, 1.Ke2 made seven documented cameo appearances, because some openings exist purely for the bit.
The Rivalry Files
Every grinder has a recurring cast. The centerpiece is Wellington Albuquerque Jr., against whom the record stands at 21 wins, 366 losses, and zero draws across 387 games, a rivalry in the same sense that a salmon has a rivalry with a bear. They keep meeting anyway, which is either admirable persistence or the sunk cost fallacy wearing a chess clock.
- leonardocesarini27: one win in 78 meetings. That win is presumably framed.
- Jéssica Trindade Hubner: 234 games, a long-running education in humility.
- Bárbara Ribeiro Araújo: a rare winning rivalry at 81-64-3, proof it can be done.
- Wagnerfreitas wagnerfreitas: 53-38-2, another entry in the short but proud victories column.
- bella_baxter: 10-59-2, rounds out the rogues' gallery.
Habits of a Highly Effective Grinder
- Early resignation rate: 1.56 percent. Positions are not surrendered; they are outlived.
- Endgames arrive in 60.8 percent of games, and the average win stretches to nearly 62 moves. This is deep endgame country.
- Even after dropping a piece, fsds01 still wins about 42 percent of games. The comeback is a lifestyle.
- One-sided losses make up under 3 percent of defeats. Even the losses are competitive.
- 74,396 checks delivered over the years, with the queen the favorite delivery method by a landslide.
- Peak performance hour: 10 a.m., a 55.2 percent win rate. The 11 a.m. hour collapses to 42.6 percent, so the optimal strategy is to win fast and log off.
- Friday is the best day of the week. Monday is a documented hazard zone.
- Lower-rated opponents fall 70.1 percent of the time, higher-rated ones 27.4 percent. The ladder is climbed the honest way.
The Daily Chess Incident
In September 2022, fsds01 attempted slow daily chess exactly twice: a Ruy Lopez Exchange as White and a Closed Catalan as Black. Both were lost. The daily rating settled at a diplomatic 376, the format was never touched again, and the whole experiment has been filed in the drawer where it belongs.
The State of the Grind
As of late 2026 the engine is still running. Blitz has been rebuilt to a mid-2026 peak of 1888, rapid cruises around 2100, and the average game keeps getting longer, from about 46 moves per game in 2017 to more than 72 today. One province remains unconquered: bullet chess, a lifetime 1,647-2,482 wasteland with a modest peak of 1566. Every empire has one, and fsds01 has made peace with it. The blitz queue, meanwhile, keeps waiting, and the queen is already up the board.