I made 300 people play blitz for a month

Here's what I learned

In November, I ran the 100 Games of Blitz Challenge. The stipulations were as follows: five games of 3+2, five days a week. This adds up to 25 games/week, or 100 games for the month. Over 300 people signed up. In this post I’ll go over the biggest lessons learned.

I quickly realized some adjustments were necessary from the initial challenge. For less experienced players, 3+2 was too fast, so I recommended adjusting the daily challenge to two games of 5+3 for players rated under 1600. Additionally, many players had their own schedule restrictions or favorite time controls, and I encouraged them to adapt the challenge to fit their routine.

The Data

I collected the Chess.com/Lichess screennames for all participants so I could easily access their results. I’m planning to do a more rigorous data analysis, but a few initial summary statistics:

• 26114 total games

• 12619 wins

• 12239 losses

• 1256 draws

• -576 rating points gained

Yes, that’s right, on average people lost rating points in this challenge. That wasn’t what I expected!

However, that number includes players whose initial rating didn’t reflect their real strength. For example, one player lost 1218 points. There were no comparably large rating gains. I expect that filtering for players with an established starting rating, and who actually did the challenge, will end up showing a modest rating gain on average.

To be honest, I was expecting bigger rating gains overall, but in hindsight a month really isn’t a long time to upgrade your chess. Many players did report qualitative improvements in their chess.

For example, one player said, “But much, much more importantly, I finally got used to a sensible Blitz routine that I intend to keep, and which will get me through and keep me in shape when I’m not playing a decent number of OTB classical games.”

Below, my top seven takeaways, and my own experience as a participant in the challenge…