Itaka66: The 1.b3 Evangelist of the Blitz Pool
Itaka66 is not a tournament professional, not a prodigy, and not a mystery account that appears for six games a year. Itaka66 is something rarer and a lot more entertaining: a genuine blitz lifer. Since April 2023 this account has piled up more than 56,000 rated games across blitz, bullet and rapid, and the overwhelming majority of them have been played at the three, five and ten minute end of the clock. Blitz is the home address. Everything else is a holiday.
Open the game history and the first thing that stands out is not a rating, it is the sheer industrial volume. Months of 2,000 or more blitz games are not a typo in the archive. At one point in 2024 the account played 2,374 games in a single month. That is not a hobby. That is a shift pattern.
A Repertoire Built on Odd Ideas
Plenty of players spend their study time memorising the main lines of the Sicilian Defense. Itaka66 has taken a different road, and helped repopulate the whole surrounding countryside. The favourite child is the Nimzo-Larsen Attack, 1.b3, which shows up thousands of times in the database and is the single most trusty first move of the 2024 to 2026 period. Alongside it sits a heavy dose of 1.d4 systems, and the surprise burst of 1.Nf3 in the 2026 games.
From the black side, the loyalty is even more remarkable. The Czech Defense is by far the most played line in the entire account, with over 9,000 blitz games logged in it. The Modern Defense is a close second in spirit if not in number, and there are regular visits to the Amar Gambit, the Australian Defense, and the Dory Defense, which is the kind of name that makes opponents google it mid-game and lose on time.
- Favourite white systems: Amazon Attack (53.1 percent), Nimzo-Larsen Attack (50.6 percent), Australian Defense
- Favourite black systems: Czech Defense, Modern Defense, Amar Gambit, Dory Defense
- Bullet specialities: Colle-style setups, the Amazon Attack, the French Defense Exchange Variation
- Fastest route to a check: queen, always the queen
Nobody Checks First More Often
The statistical fingerprint of this player is genuinely fun. Itaka66 lands the first check in roughly 57.9 percent of analysed games, and that single event changes everything: the win rate when the first check is delivered is 57.8 percent, while being checked first drops it to 44.5 percent. The most common checking piece is, by a wide margin, the queen, with 45,194 recorded queen checks. There is a very clear picture here: the pieces get tangled, the queen arrives, the position turns.
And when it turns into a fight, it is a long one. The average game runs past 70 moves. The endgame appears in about 74 percent of games. The early resignation rate is a tiny 0.8 percent, which means almost nobody walks away, and neither does Itaka66. Comeback rate sits at 77.15 percent, which is a polite way of saying that losing a piece has, in this player's hands, been reclassified as a mild inconvenience rather than an emergency.
Bullet, and the Fine Art of the Flag Fall
Bullet tells the other half of the story. The bullet archive holds over 26,000 games and a peak rating that hangs just under the 2,200 mark. That 2264 (2025-05-11) figure from the blitz side is the headline, and the blitz pool is where the rating chart really lives. The bullet data is also where the clock does the talking: 2,287 recorded wins on timeout and 1,697 losses, with 44 games somehow drawn by stalemate. In bullet, a stalemate is a genuine achievement.
Rivalries and the Regulars
After tens of thousands of games, it is inevitable that some opponents become familiar. The most played rival is erduezman across 59 games, a series that sits just the wrong side of level. It is a slightly cleaner story against Amir Hossein Sharif Razavian, where the score reads 23 wins, 11 losses and 5 draws, which is a genuine account-plus. There are also 41 games against cavakov and a tight 19-17-5 record that organised sports journalists would describe as a title race.
The opponent record is the tell. A player with 30,000 blitz games wins roughly half of them, and that is exactly what this account does: 50.0 percent, adjusted for strength. It is not a wall, it is a conveyor belt.
A Typical Setup
Want to see what the 1.b3 treatment looks like? Here is the kind of shape that shows up over and over in the Nimzo-Larsen archives.
Fun Fact Files
- Best hour to play: 1 a.m. local, with a 57.3 percent win rate. Worst hour: 3 a.m., at 42.75 percent. Sleep is still undefeated.
- The tilt factor is 14, which is a fairly calm number for someone who plays this much.
- The scariest sight in the game history is a Russian-style opening name with an accent mark, waiting to be looked up.
- Against weaker opposition, the win rate is a healthy 62.1 percent. Against stronger opposition, it is 30.5 percent. The wall is the wall.
Itaka66 is a player who gave up on fashion in the opening, kept the full 40-move grind, and plays more game after game than most people play forever. It is a totally original approach to chess, and the clock is always running.