Matin Shams: The Man Who Runs Mazes
Some people play chess. Matin Shams, known to the online world as maze_runner2021, apparently lives inside one. The username suggests someone who enjoys complicated positions, and the game history backs it up: since first appearing in April 2021, he has carved out a reputation as a tireless blitz warrior who simply refuses to be told a position is lost.
And "refuses" is putting it lightly. His comeback rate sits north of 86%, and he wins more than half his games even after dropping a piece. Most players would resign. Matin sees a doomed position and thinks, "excellent, now the real game begins." His early resignation rate of under 4% means opponents rarely get the satisfaction of a quick surrender. If you want to beat him, you had better finish the job.
2901 (2024-12-16)
Opening Report: The Caro-Kann Lifers Club
Every chess player has a comfort food opening, and Matin's is the Caro-Kann Defense. He has played it hundreds of times in blitz alone, grinding out solid positions in the Exchange Variation and beyond, slowly squeezing opponents who hoped for fireworks. On the white side, he is a devotee of the English and the Réti-adjacent quiet stuff, with a soft spot for the sneaky London Poisoned Pawn and the gloriously named Colle Rhamphorhynchus Variation, which sounds like a dinosaur and apparently plays like one too.
His most frequent first move? Nf3, by an absolutely staggering margin. In 2024 alone he opened with the knight 271 times. Somewhere out there, e4 weeps quietly.
Rivals, Nemeses, and Old Friends
Every grinder has a rivalry column, and Matin's is full of familiar names. He dominates LordGigantics with a lopsided winning record, trades blows with HristiyanIliev06 in a perfectly even standoff, and has played marty-bird and mgca2009 more than twenty times each, with very different results against the two.
But then there is Artin Ashraf. Twenty games. Two wins. Fifteen losses. Some rivalries are battles of equals; others are just a maze with one exit, and Matin has not found it yet. Keep running, maze runner. One day.
The Daily Chess Mystery
Here is the strangest entry in the file: in slower daily chess, Matin's record is a spectacular disaster, including a winless run with the Barnes Defense, an opening widely regarded as a joke, which in his case appears to have been played completely seriously. Give the man a clock counting down in minutes and he is a machine. Give him a whole day per move and he turns into someone who has never seen a chessboard before. Chess psychology remains an unsolved science.
Style Notes
- Plays long, grinding games; his average win runs past 80 moves, and even his losses stretch longer than his wins.
- An endgame specialist by volume, with the vast majority of his games reaching the final phase.
- Delivers checks with rooks and queens relentlessly, averaging over three checks per game.
- At his best in the early morning hours, with a win rate at 7 AM that would embarrass most night owls.
- Has survived a 20-game losing streak and answered it with an 18-game winning streak, which is the most maze_runner2021 thing possible.
Blitz is his battlefield of choice: hundreds of games, a steady climb from the 1800s to the stratosphere, and a style built on patience, resilience, and an almost supernatural refusal to give up. Whether he is outgrinding a London System stonewaller or digging out of a lost ending, Matin Shams plays the long game, literally.