1 July – 2 September 2026
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781 games of chess with one minute on the clock and nothing added back. Each thread is one game. It hangs from the full minute and runs down my clock, move by move, until the game stopped.
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Blue where I stood better, red where I stood worse.
Grey is level, or the first few moves, before the engine starts judging. The colour changes only when I move: every step is one position Stockfish scored. Left to right runs July to September.
The longer I stop, the worse it goes.
- 5.3%
- under 2 s
- 9.3%
- 2–5 s
- 17%
- 5–10 s
- 30.4%
- over 10 s
How often a move was a blunder, by how long I thought. Lit on the curtain: every pause of five seconds or more. The pause doesn't cause the blunder. The position that made me stop was already the hard one.
20.8 seconds
The longest I stopped in two months, on 9 July, already losing. The move I found made it worse. Mate came on the next move.
Dead lost, then dead won.
Ten times the evaluation swung from under 3% to 85% or better between two of my moves, because the other side blundered back. Four of those games I still lost, on time.
382 games ended on a clock.
Now sorted by the time I had left when each game ended. 170 times the clock that ran out was mine: the block on the right, all the way to the floor.
29 wins with a second or less to spare.
25 on the other player's flag, 4 by mate. They sit right beside the block, a hair above the floor.
1084 to 1409
My rating over the 41 days. In between: 10 hours 19 minutes of my own clock, and 69 games on the busiest day, 17 July. The shape on the right is every game, ordered by what my clock still held when it ended.
781 one-minute games from my chess.com archive. Every move after the first four was scored by Stockfish 16 at 500,000 nodes. Win chance uses the Lichess curve; a blunder gives away 20 points of it or more.