Reading Your Player Card

A single rating number tells you how strong you are. It tells you nothing about how you are strong — whether you win by grinding people down or by attacking, whether you fall apart after a loss, whether the clock is your problem.

The player card breaks your recent games into four dimensions plus an overall score. This article explains where each number comes from, so you can judge for yourself whether it is telling you something useful.

The Four Stats

ATK (Attack) measures aggressive, tactical strength. It is based on your fast-mode rating — bullet and blitz — and boosted by accuracy, how often you finish games by checkmate, and wins against stronger opponents.

DEF (Defense) measures solidity. It is based on your rapid and blitz rating, boosted by quality draws against stronger opponents, and penalised for losses against weaker ones. A high DEF with a low ATK usually means you are hard to beat but rarely force the issue.

MENTAL measures how you hold up after things go wrong. It tracks your win rate in the games immediately following a loss, plus your current streak. Loss streaks pull it down. This is the stat most players find uncomfortable, and it is often the most informative.

TIME measures clock handling. For players active in several time controls it reflects how much better you perform at faster ones. For everyone it is boosted by wins on time and penalised by losses on time.

OVR (Overall) is the plain one: a pure rating-based score with no style adjustments, showing roughly where you stand.

How the Card Changes by Mode

The card can show all your games together or a single time control. This matters more than it sounds. A player who is 1500 at blitz and 1900 at rapid has an "All" view that describes nobody — it averages two different players into one profile.

Looking mode by mode is usually more honest. If your ATK is high in blitz and mediocre in rapid, that is a real pattern: you are relying on speed and initiative rather than calculation, and it stops working when the opponent has time to think.

A mode only gets its own rating readout once there are at least five games in it. Below that the sample is too small to say anything, so the card leaves it out rather than showing a number built on two games.

Accuracy and Performance

Average accuracy is the mean move accuracy across your games that have engine evaluation available. It needs at least five evaluated games before it appears — an accuracy figure from one game is noise.

Average performance is different and often more useful: it reflects how strongly you played relative to your opponents, regardless of whether you won. You can lose a game and still have played at a high performance level, and over a run of games that gap tells you whether you are underperforming your rating or overperforming it.

The Win and Loss Breakdowns

Both are split by how the game actually ended: checkmate, resignation, time, or abandonment. Hovering a segment shows the count.

This is worth more than a bare win percentage. Losing regularly on time is a clock problem, not a chess problem, and it has a different fix. Winning mostly by opponent resignation rather than checkmate says something about the kind of positions you reach. Two players with identical scores can have completely different breakdowns.

What These Numbers Are Not

They are derived from your own game results, not from an engine assessment of your understanding. A high ATK means your results look aggressive, not that a coach would call your attacking play sound.

They are also sensitive to sample size and to the timeframe you have selected. A bad week moves MENTAL noticeably. Treat the card as a description of a recent stretch of games, not a permanent verdict on your chess — the same way you should treat any single number.