hearts_alive: A Chess Biography
Some players treat the first move like a philosophical question. hearts_alive treats it like a vowel. Since 2020, almost every game has begun with 1.e4, occasionally with 1.Nf3 when feeling fancy, and with 1.d4 only a handful of times in six years, presumably to check whether the d pawn still works. It does. hearts_alive just does not trust it.
This is a player built on volume, stubbornness, and a long, dramatic relationship with the clock. More than 6,300 games have been recorded, most of them long, many of them messy, and a remarkable number of them reaching an endgame when a quicker exit was available.
Blitz Beginnings
The story starts in early 2018, with a rating in the 700s and a lot of optimism. Blitz was the entry point, the fast and forgiving format where habits get built and bad habits get baked in. By September 2020 hearts_alive had climbed to a Blitz peak of 964 (2020-09-03), and then, in the way of many players who discover longer games, simply stopped showing up for Blitz. The 227 Blitz wins and 209 losses are now a historical artifact, like a fossil of a faster, younger era.
The Rapid Years: A Sawtooth With an Upward Slope
Rapid is where the real body of work lives: nearly 5,800 games, 2,566 wins, 2,493 losses, and 661 draws. The first rated Rapid games in May 2020 started around 843. By December of that same year the number was 1467, a rise so steep it looks like a typo in the ledger.
Then came the great slide. From a February 2022 high of 1707, hearts_alive fell all the way to roughly 1052 by November 2022, losing about 650 points in nine months while refusing, apparently, to change anything about the repertoire. It is one of the more honest rating charts you will ever see: not a decline, a demolition.
The rebuild was slower and better. 2023 ended near 1958, 2024 pushed past 2100, 2025 spent a full year grinding sideways in the 2100s, and then 2026 delivered the payoff: a Rapid peak of 2364 (2026-04-19) in April 2026, with the rating still hovering around 2270 at the end of that October.
Openings, Sort Of
Calling this a repertoire would be generous. It is more of a collection of enthusiasms. The Blackburne Shilling Gambit leads the way with over 500 outings and a 49.8 percent win rate, which is a respectable return on a move that most coaches would confiscate. The Caro-Kann Defense Exchange Variation appears more than 340 times, and the Bird Opening's Dutch Variation with the Batavo Gambit shows up over 260 times, a combination that suggests hearts_alive enjoys positions nobody has prepared for, including themselves.
The rest of the top ten is a tour of romantic leftovers: the Two Knights, the Four Knights, the Scotch Game, the Philidor. There is even an opening called the Amazon Attack, played 117 times with a 46 percent score, which is either a deep strategic choice or a dare.
Style: Endgames, Comebacks, and Late Escapes
Ask what kind of player hearts_alive is and the numbers answer without hesitating. Roughly 76 percent of games reach an endgame. The average decisive game lasts about 80 moves and the average draw runs past 110. This is not someone who tries to win in fifteen moves. This is someone who assumes you will still be there in hour two.
It is also a player who does not give up. The early resignation rate is 1.42 percent, meaning hearts_alive will play on in nearly any position, and the comeback rate sits at 78.45 percent. Even after losing a piece, the win rate holds above 41 percent. Opponents resign against hearts_alive far more often than the reverse, 2,096 times to 1,660, which is the polite way of saying the pressure usually lands eventually.
Against lower rated opposition the win rate is 60 percent. Against higher rated opposition it collapses to 29 percent. The gap is not subtle, but neither is the honesty of it.
Clock Management, Broadly Defined
There are 232 wins and 355 losses by timeout on the record, a number that tells its own story about a person who would rather think for ten more seconds than press the button. There are also 37 stalemate draws, which means 37 occasions where somebody was swindled. The records do not say which side of the board it was, and hearts_alive has never once volunteered the information.
For what it is worth, the seven o'clock hour has produced a perfect win rate. So has five in the morning. The samples are tiny, but a hundred percent is a hundred percent, and hearts_alive has never been shy about small samples.
Rivals
No account of hearts_alive is complete without the recurring cast. Francisco Uribe is the most frequent opponent with 30 games, and the series is beautifully balanced at 12 wins, 10 losses, and 8 draws. HAIDER ALI has the edge across 23 meetings at 13 to 9. allokonny leads 11 to 7, and mario8211 remains dead even at 9 apiece with 3 draws. These are not random usernames. They are a small, well-worn neighborhood.
Quick Facts
- Nearly exclusive 1.e4 player, with occasional detours and one memorable d pawn experiment per year
- Favorite battleground: long endgames of 80 moves or more
- Preferred format: fast sessions, with Blitz still the sentimental choice
- Longest recorded winning streak: 20 games
- Best documented hour of the day: 07:00, undefeated
- Record by resignation: 2,096 wins, 1,660 losses
- Signature opening: the Blackburne Shilling Gambit, for better and for worse