Who Is Noam Feinberg?
Noam Feinberg, known on the board as noamapplesauce, is a National Master whose chess life reads like a very long, very loud argument with a chessboard that he has slowly been winning. The first traces appear in 2010, when a rating of 997 met a single Blitz game and lost it. That was the entire year. Most people would have taken the hint. Noam took it as a warm up.
Since then the account has become a small industrial operation. More than fourteen thousand Blitz wins, thousands more in Bullet, and a Rapid record that looks suspiciously like a specialist sneaking in under a different name. The peak Blitz number, 2373 (2026-01-19), is respectable. The volume behind it is less respectable and more impressive.
The Long Climb
The rating chart of this player is not a smooth curve. It is a mountain range with opinions. There are years of steady grinding, months of sudden vertical leaps, and occasional cliffs where a 2,300 player briefly decided to identify as a 1,800 player for a few weeks.
What stands out is the willingness to keep playing through all of it. Nearly every year brings thousands of games, and the pattern rarely changes: crash downward, grind back up, overshoot the old peak, repeat. The 2026 calendar year alone produced a Blitz high in the 2,370s and a Rapid rating that pushed past 2,400, which suggests the "Rapid is my serious time control" story is not just a story.
Opening Repertoire, Such As It Is
Noam opens with 1.e4. Not usually, not mostly, but basically always. In one recent year the first move count read 1,805 games with e4 against 23 with e3 and 13 with g3. The white pieces come with a plan, and the plan begins with the same square every time.
- The Caro-Kann Defense shows up over a thousand times and delivers a healthy scoring rate, which is quietly the most reliable thing in the whole repertoire.
- The Berlin Defense appears in both its broad and Berlin Wall forms, a combined mountain of games and a combined shrug of "yes, we are doing the endgame thing again."
- The Sicilian Defense gets treated to Moscow and Alapin treatments, with the Moscow Variation producing the sort of win rate that gets quietly cropped out of screenshots sent to friends.
- Against 1.e4, the Blackburne Shilling Gambit and the Barnes Defense account for a genuinely absurd number of games, which says something about the opponents and probably something about Noam too.
Rivalries and Regulars
Online chess produces familiar faces, and this account has a full dinner party of them. The most frequent dance partner is timeless limitless, a rivalry standing at 128 games and a near perfect split, with 62 wins, 57 losses and 9 draws. Nothing has been settled there and probably nothing ever will be.
Then there is babadroga92, who has 39 games in the ledger and a 28 to 9 edge over Noam, a record that must sting every time the pairings spin up. On the happier side sits krisbim, who has been beaten 59 times in 92 meetings, which is the kind of relationship that keeps a person queueing for one more.
Style, Temperament, and Suspicious Habits
The endgame arrives in roughly three quarters of these games, so anyone hoping for a quick tactical knockout should bring a snack and a plan. Captures start early, around move seven on average, so the board does not stay crowded for long.
The most entertaining stat is the symmetry: the longest winning streak is 17 games, and the longest losing streak is also 17 games. This is a player who commits fully to both directions. The comeback rate is famously high, and wins after dropping a piece land near half the time, which suggests a stubborn refusal to accept the obvious verdict of the position.
Early resignations are rare, well under two percent of games, so opponents can expect to actually finish what they start. The best hour of the day according to the numbers is 10:00 in the morning, which means the sharpest version of this National Master shows up before lunch and the most experimental version shows up later.
Off the Board
- Started with a single rated loss in 2010 and decided that was the beginning, not the end.
- Has played enough games to make a small town's entire chess club look underemployed.
- Delivers the first check in about six of every ten games, mostly with the queen, because subtlety is a sometimes food.
- Prefers Blitz above all else, which explains both the rating swings and the impressive reaction speed.
National Master is the official line on the profile. The unofficial line is that Noam Feinberg plays an enormous amount of chess, loses gracefully, wins stubbornly, and treats a 17 game losing streak as a scheduling problem rather than a verdict.