Antoine, Your Rating Is Moving Fast
Over the last month you gained roughly 135 rating points, and over three months around 255. That is a serious climb at any speed, and you are doing it in bullet, which is the hardest place to improve. A few things stand out as genuinely strong in the games you sent.
- You defend your clock. Two of your wins ended with you under a second on the timer, and you still found the right last moves. That is a real bullet skill and plenty of players never develop it.
- You are comfortable in messy positions. In the win over Giorgi_Gege you finished the game with two queens on the board. You kept finding moves in a position where most people would have frozen.
- Your Sicilian Defense results are your strongest big sample by a wide margin, which tells me your tactical instincts in open positions are genuinely good.
The Clock Is Still Your Biggest Leak
You win a lot of games on time, but you also lose them on time, and the pattern repeats. In the Giorgi_Gege game your last three moves were played with half a second, four tenths and one tenth on the clock. In the EZ_MONEY_ALL_DAY game you were down to one tenth of a second at move 64 after sixty moves of shuffling. That is pure flagging chess, and it works right up until the game where it does not.
The other side of the coin shows up in the loss to wolfer7098. There you still had around 16 seconds at move 47 while your opponent had about 7, and you were the one who got mated. So the issue is not that you are always short of time. It is that you spend it unevenly: you burn seconds on routine moves and then have none left for the moves that actually decide the game.
Two habits will fix most of this. First, decide your first four or five moves as Black before the game even starts, so the opening costs you nothing. Second, the moment you notice you are under about 10 seconds in a one minute game, stop calculating long lines and only look for checks, captures and threats. Simple moves keep you alive in time trouble. Clever moves lose on time.
Stop Eating Pawns While Theirs Run
Against wolfer7098 you played a solid, unremarkable opening and reached a balanced middlegame with opposite side pawn majorities. Here is how the game began, so you can see the structure that led to the trouble later.
Later in that same game you had a rook on the seventh rank and two spare pawns on the kingside. Instead of turning back, you grabbed pawns on the kingside while their queenside pawns ran free. By the time your rook returned to the b file it was too late. Their pawn reached the second rank, pushed on, and promoted. Their other pawn promoted to a rook and delivered mate on the back rank.
The lesson is about connected pawns. Two pawns side by side on the queenside are faster than two pawns on the kingside, because your rook simply cannot stop both at once. When your opponent has passed pawns, your rook belongs behind them or in front of them, never on the far side of the board scooping up loose material. That is tunnel vision, and it cost you a game you were not losing.
You already know how powerful this is when you are the one pushing. In the Giorgi_Gege game you promoted on the a file and the game was effectively over. Treat your opponent's passed pawn with the same urgency you feel about your own.
Your Opening Choices Deserve A Second Look
You have a personal style and it clearly works. You favour Hypermodern setups with the pawn on b6, the bishop fianchettoed on b7 and a delayed push in the centre. You won two of the three games you sent from that structure, so keep it.
Two areas are worth reviewing though.
- In the loss to Kantor_isback you played an early b5 and then put your rook on a7 after the bishop trade on the long diagonal. That rook was a spectator for the entire game and you eventually lost on time. If a line leaves you with a passive rook on move four, the surprise value is probably not worth the cost.
- The Scotch Game is your weakest large sample with White. The Amar Gambit lines are in the same bucket. If a set of lines keeps costing you games, either learn its main plans properly or drop it entirely. A weak system played on autopilot just donates points.
Spend your study time where the games are. Your best big sample by far is the Closed Sicilian Defense, and it is worth knowing that structure deeply rather than adding more novelty elsewhere.
A Simple Plan For The Next Week
- Pick three setups, one for White and two for Black, and play only those for a week. Less thinking in the opening means more seconds for the middlegame.
- Play ten games with one rule: you must have 15 seconds left at move 30. Ignore the result completely. You are training your clock, not your rating.
- Do ten minutes of rook endgame drills a day, focused on rooks behind passed pawns and active kings. Your long games keep arriving in these endings and the wins are sitting there for the taking.
- Go back through the wolfer7098 game and find the exact move where you should have abandoned the kingside pawns. Spotting that moment in a live game is worth a lot of rating.
You are improving faster than almost anyone at your level. Tighten the clock and stop giving away pawn races, and the next hundred points should arrive even quicker.