Kwame (TryingToGetBetter94): A Username With a Built-In Deadline
Few online chess players have ever picked a username with more personal accountability than Kwame, known across the online chess world as TryingToGetBetter94. It takes courage to publicly announce a self-improvement mission. It takes real talent to actually complete it. In March 2013, Kwame played a single blitz game, lost it, and vanished for three years. When he returned in 2016, he returned like a chess-playing storm front.
The Great Bullet Climb of 2016
Kwame entered May 2016 as a bullet chess beginner and, within roughly eight months, had rocketed to 2650 (2016-12-28), an ascent of well over 1300 points. His
is less a growth curve and more a ski jump. Along the way he accumulated more than 10,900 bullet games, a volume of online chess that can only be described as industrial. Did he get better? The database says yes, emphatically, and it has the receipts.An Opening Repertoire With Personality
Kwame's repertoire reads like a dare. He owns over 500 bullet games of Amar Gambit experience and is still above water with it, which may be a first in recorded chess history. Against the Ruy Lopez he adopts the Schliemann Defense, because apparently classical positions need more chaos. With the white pieces he opens 1.d4 by an overwhelming margin and has developed a genuine vendetta against the Pirc, meeting it with the Pirc Defense: Austrian Attack to the tune of a 64% win rate. When that setup lands on the board, it tends to look like this:
The only known repellent is the Nimzo-Larsen Attack, which opponents have used against him with disturbing success. Every hero has a weakness.
Nemeses and Regular Victims
Kwame's chess social calendar is stacked. MasterLeif and ... .... have each faced him more than 250 times in matchups so evenly matched they could be settled by coin flip. Hoang Thong Tu remains the wall he keeps running into, a 201-game rivalry that leans stubbornly the wrong way. On the sunnier side, username54144 has spent considerable time on the wrong end of the score, losing 115 games while winning only 30, a record that suggests a very patient friendship.
Style: Never Dead, Occasionally Grumpy
- Comeback rate of 86.5%: drop a piece against Kwame and you have started a negotiation, not won.
- Endgame play in 82% of games, with wins averaging nearly 80 moves: he grinds long after the opening theory is forgotten.
- Early resignation in over half his losses: when Kwame decides it is over, the handshake is implied.
- A 19-game winning streak, balanced against a 17-game losing streak, because balance matters.
- Peak performance at noon: a certified lunch-break chess warrior.
- Favorite checking piece: the rook, delivered in bulk.
One footnote: the database insists he has delivered zero checkmates in nearly 13,000 analyzed games. We choose to believe this is a clerical error, because those resignations had to happen for some reason.
The Rapid Plot Twist
Here is the twist ending: for all the bullet mayhem, Kwame's preferred time control is rapid chess, where his record is nearly spotless and his peak sits at 2000 (2017-10-31). It turns out the man who plays bullet like he is being chased by bees also appreciates the occasional long think. The username remains aspirational, the trajectory remains upward, and the mission status remains exactly as advertised: still trying to get better.