I started playing chess on Chess.com in April 2024. Fourteen months later – on July 8, 2025 – I hit 1,000 ELO in blitz chess.

My chess.com ELO stats page. My blitz ELO rating over time.

1,000 ELO seemed almost completely unobtainable to me when I started playing chess, and I’ve had it in mind as a goal for more than a year. To some degree, 1,000 ELO is a totally arbitrary threshold, but I’ve seen chatter on Reddit describing 1000 ELO as the entrypoint to “intermediate” chess. In other words, I’m no longer a complete chess beginner!

Helpfully, Chess.com shows the rating distribution, which confirms that I’m moving off the low-skill “hump” where most players live to the long tail of higher-skill chess. 1,000 ELO puts me at the 80th percentile among active Chess.com players.

Blitz ELO distribution, roughly Poission distributed. 1000 ELO is at the 80th percentile. Distribution of blitz ELO ratings on Chess.com.

What I would be interested to know is whether I’m “slow” or “fast” to get to 1,000 ELO compared to other players. I played 1,546 blitz games to get there, 99% of which used the 3+0 time control.

A game summary, showing 1,546 games and a 50% win rate. A summary of my blitz games.

However, this summary is misleading. While I played 1,500 blitz games, I played over 5,500 games of 1+1 bullet. I just find bullet incredibly fun, because it doesn’t feel like there’s time to think through plans; instead, it’s all about pattern recognition.

As far as I can tell, playing bullet is basically the worst way to improve at chess. Others have given the generic advice of playing at the slowest time control you can stand and analyzing all of your games afterwards using Stockfish. I relatively rarely reviewed my games, and I played the fastest blitz time control that exists. Furthermore, I didn’t do any “lessons” and did very few puzzles. Basically all I did was play bullet games.

Basically, I’m somewhat surprised to see that I improved using this “low weight, high reps, inconsistently” approach. It’s a good lesson that bad practice is still worth something. If I wanted to improve, I should set more explicit performance goals. And rather than passively watching GothamChess videos – which is what got me into chess in the first place – I could do some intentional practice.

Will I do that? Probably not! Ultimately, I’m still enjoying playing chess without specific performance goals. Expect to keep seeing me on the bullet ladder, blundering my queen to forks and discovered attacks.