tabacaba: A Bullet Chess Glow-Up Story
Every online chess account has an origin story. tabacaba's begins in March 2020, when the world locked down and a debut bullet rating of 621 suggested the board may have been assembled upside down. Roughly 4,300 games later, the same account boasts a peak bullet rating of 2370, a peak blitz rating of 2295, and a rapid rating that crossed 2000 in early 2026. Frogs have undergone less dramatic metamorphoses.
The Slow Burn and the 2025 Afterburner
The first two years were honest blue-collar chess: grind, lose, grind again, until the blitz rating idled in the mid-1500s by 2021. Then came the drowsy stretch of 2022 through 2024, when the account sat parked with the engine still warm. In August 2025, somebody found the keys. What followed was pure afterburner: 391 bullet games in September 2025, then 538 bullet games and 364 blitz games in October, and a climb of roughly 1,000 bullet rating points in about seven months. Sleep was consulted. Sleep was overruled.
Repertoire: 1.e4 Always, French Forever
As White, tabacaba opened 1.e4 in 890 of about 900 White games in 2025, meeting the Sicilian with the patient Closed Sicilian, good for a 68.75% win rate in rapid. As Black, there is one church and it is the French Defense, played in every flavor (Exchange, Advance, Burn, Classical, Tarrasch) across more than 400 games, making tabacaba a certified French Defense specialist by sheer volume. The Czech Defense fills the gaps, and the Amar Gambit has been a reliable income stream in bullet at 57.69%. One confession: the Svenonius Variation of the French Classical, a 16.67% rapid win rate that is less a strategy and more a penance.
Opponents who reach for the Blackburne Shilling Gambit on move three discover that tabacaba has sidestepped the trap dozens of times, winning 67.5% of those bullet encounters. The trap dates to the 1800s. tabacaba does not.
Nemeses, Victims, and the caterpiller Question
- leoncolonia is the defining rivalry: 117 games split 48-44-25, essentially a coin flip with a profile page.
- panchon333: 30 games, 30 wins, 0 losses. Perfection so clean the statisticians checked the database twice.
- Santiago Rodriguez: 0 wins in 10 attempts. Every caterpillar becomes a butterfly, but apparently some appointments keep getting rescheduled.
- genacaba: beaten 17-3-4. The suspiciously similar username suggests a sibling, a cousin, or a very committed mirror.
- lisandro9 and cabeza979 have each donated a tidy 9-0 to the collection.
Style: The Stubborn Endgame Nocturne
The numbers describe a resilient, endgame-loving creature of the night:
- Early resignation rate: 2.36%. Games here are not abandoned, they are slow-fermented.
- Comeback rate: 79.8%. Dropping a piece is treated as a rounding error.
- 68% of games reach the endgame, where all that fermenting pays off.
- Tilt factor: 11 out of 100. The pulse barely registers a check.
- Best hour: 4 AM, with a 62.96% win rate. At 10 AM the win rate is 0%. This is not a morning person; it is a nocturnal predator with a mug.
- Longest winning streak: 17 games. Longest losing streak: 11, buried quickly and never spoken of again.
- Performs nearly 6 percentage points better in rated games than casual ones. Stakes make the fingers faster.
Fast Facts
- Preferred time control: rapid, though bullet is where the true transformation happened.
- Most common checking piece: the queen, with 4,001 career checks and counting.
- Average first capture: move 6.5. Patience before the knives come out.
- Best day of the week: Saturday. Worst: Wednesday, because of course it is.
- Daily chess peak: 1445. Even a nocturne needs a nap sometimes.
The moral of the tabacaba story: start small, plateau politely, wake up at 4 AM, play the French Defense until the rating graph begs for mercy, and never, ever resign early.