30 Days of Puzzle Racer: The Challenge That Made Me Feel Weaker

Since around April 2024, I’ve been doing Puzzle Racer almost every day as part of what we call Fami-Lee Racer. It’s a daily Racer session on stream, running from 8 to 10 AM CST, where we race together, track scores, and at the end of each week, the top performer receives a prize. What started as a fun community routine slowly became a serious habit for me.

A few months ago, the routine even grew into a competition called Fami-Lee50. The top 10 performers from the previous weeks qualified and competed in 50 rounds of Puzzle Racer. That event made me realize how deeply Racer had become part of both my personal routine and our community.

From April 2024 until the time I’m writing this blog, I’ve played 17,439 Puzzle Racer runs, with my highest score being 88. Racer has become one of the most consistent parts of my chess life. It is not something I do occasionally, but something I return to every day. Because of that, this 30-day challenge wasn’t about getting familiar with Racer. The real purpose was to find the best way for me to actually improve at it.

At first, I thought Puzzle Racer was mostly about familiarity. I believed the puzzles were repetitive, and that the same puzzles or at least the same positions appeared over and over again. My assumption was that if I reviewed all my failed puzzles, I wouldn’t fall for the same problems anymore, and my Racer performance would naturally improve.

One day during a normal Puzzle Racer session, my friend Mr. Noblerone (Mr Noble's Lichess / noblerone - Twitch) told me to look at the puzzles I failed. That became the idea for this year. I decided that my 30-day challenge would be to review all my failed puzzles from Racer and try to understand my patterns.

In the middle of the challenge, my friend Akmal (AK_cage - Twitch / Akmal's Github) made me a custom extension to track my Racer runs. It helped me collect failed puzzles automatically and made the whole process easier. You can checkout this helpful extension here (akmalkrmv/lichess-puzzles-extension)
The plan was simple. Every day, I did Racer, collected every failed puzzle, and reviewed them. I tracked the themes and mistakes and tried to fix the patterns that kept appearing. It looked like a good method. It felt organized and meaningful.

But after looking closely at my mistakes, I realized that my original belief wasn’t true at all. Puzzle Racer isn’t repetitive in the sense of using the same puzzles again and again. The positions change constantly. What repeats are the ideas, not the exact puzzles.
And maybe something was wrong with how I approached it, but instead of giving me a confidence boost, reviewing my failed puzzles actually made me feel more insecure. I noticed that sometimes I failed the most basic mate in one puzzles. Seeing that made me start doubting myself during Racer runs. I began to hesitate before making moves, thinking, what if I’m wrong again?
(I placed the 30-day Puzzle Racer challenge stats at the end of the blog to keep the main story clean and focused.)

Before this challenge, I used to just play the first move that came to my mind. I trusted my instinct and let speed carry me. But during this challenge, I started overthinking and calculating even the simplest puzzles while racing.
I was not satisfied with myself in this challenge.

In the past months, on random days, I could hit scores 80s multiple times in a week without much trouble. Earlier this year, my goal was simply to reach 80, and at that time it felt like a big milestone. Somewhere along the way, that goal changed. Now I really want to reach 100 in Puzzle Racer. Maybe I’m becoming greedy, but it’s hard to ignore that feeling once it’s there.

This month, during the challenge, I only got 80s score three times. I felt slower. I felt less sharp. The more I focused on accuracy, the more my speed dropped. I began to notice that I failed two to three puzzles in almost every Racer run. This made me more careful, and that made me even slower. It created a strange feeling of becoming more mindful but also feeling weaker at the same time.

Even though I learned a lot about my mistakes, I cannot pretend that the experience was satisfying. It was helpful, but it did not give me the same excitement as last year’s challenge. I missed the feeling of pushing myself and getting explosive progress. This challenge felt quieter. It showed me my habits and weaknesses, but it also made me doubt myself more than I expected.

Still, reviewing my failures helped me understand my patterns. I improved my awareness, even if my scores did not show it. The extension from Akmal was very useful, and I appreciate the support from Mr. Noblerone, who tried to help me get better at Racer. I also want to give a big thank you to Knight (knightbfree - Twitch), my boyfriend, for listening to allllll my complaints about my failed Racer runs and for always supporting me through every challenge.
I also want to be honest and say that I still did not reach the goal I originally wanted from this challenge. Because of that, I don’t feel like I’m done with Puzzle Racer challenge yet. After I finish my current 30-day Music LiveLoop practice challenge, I might start another Puzzle Racer related challenge to continue searching for a better way to improve.

This year’s 30-day challenge felt more like a mental reset than a big achievement. It was not the result I wanted, but it was still something I learned from. For now, I will keep using the things I learned, even if the journey was not as satisfying as I hoped.

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30 DAYS RACER CHALLENGE DATA / STAT

\*Note : The way these stats are written changes from day to day due to a shift from manual tracking to an extension based system (which also evolve over time)

13 November 2025
42 runs PR
highscore 82
wrong : 92
avg failed : 2.19

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14 November 2025
40 runs PR
highscore 77
wrong : 104
avg : 2.6

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15 nov 2025
43 runs PR
highscore 76
wrong : 106
avg : 2.46

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16 nov 2025
37 runs PR
highscore 71
wrong : 84
wrong after recheck : 12
avg : 2.27

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17 nov 2025
41 runs PR
highscore 77
wrong : 112
wrong after recheck : 15
avg : 2.73

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18 November 2025
31 runs PR
highscore 74
wrong : 85
wrong after recheck : 9
avg : 2.74

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19 nov 2025
47 runs PR
highscore 72
wrong : 118
wrong after recheck : 11
avg : 2.51

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20 nov 2025
37 runs PR
highscore 74
wrong : 101
wrong after recheck : 11
avg : 2.72

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21 November 2025
45 runs PR
highscore 82
wrong : 104
wrong after recheck : 9
avg : 2.31

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22 November 2025
38 runs PR
highscore 70
wrong : 87
wrong after recheck : 9
avg : 2.28

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23 November 2025
35 runs PR
highscore 73
wrong : 83
wrong after recheck : 10
avg : 2.37

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24 nov 2025
38 runs PR
highscore 74
wrong : 94
wrong after recheck : 8
avg : 2.47

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25 nov 25
34 runs PR
highscore 73
wrong :91
wrong after recheck : 12
avg : 2.67

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26 November 2025
52 runs PR
highscore 76
wrong :129
avg : 2.48
High score: 76
Avg. score: 58.65

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27 November 2025 (break/no racer)

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28 November 2025
48 runs PR
highscore 77
wrong :105
avg : 2.18
High score: 77
Avg. score: 57.54

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29 NOVEMBER 2025
39 runs PR
highscore 77
wrong : 93
avg : 2.38
High score: 77
Avg. score: 53.37

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30 November 2025
51 runs PR
highscore 70
wrong : 108
avg : 2.11
Avg. score: 56.63

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December 1st 2025
40 runs PR
highscore 75
wrong : 75
avg : 1.87
Avg. score: 55.55

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December 2nd 2025
48 runs PR
highscore 76
wrong : 96
avg wrong : 2
Avg. score: 54

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December 3rd 2025
High score: 66
Avg. score: 50.02
Avg. solves: 17.51
Avg. fails: 2.37
Total Races: 41

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December 4th 2025
High score: 79
Avg. score: 57.06
Avg. solves: 19.67
Avg. fails: 2.25
Total Races: 36

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December 5th 2025
High score: 77
Avg. score: 55.08
Avg. solves: 19.16
Avg. fails: 2.16
Total Races: 38

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December 6th
High score: 75
Avg. score: 53.31
Avg. solves: 18.5
Avg. fails: 2.17
Total Races: 42

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December 7th
22 runs
High score: 69
Avg. score: 52.27
Avg. solves: 18.36
Avg. fails: 2.27

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12/08/2025 (41 runs)
High score: 73
Avg. score: 51.61
Avg. solves: 17.37
Avg. fails: 2.15

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12/09/2025 (48 runs)
High score: 78
Avg. score: 52.9
Avg. solves: 18.31
Avg. fails: 2.02

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12/10/2025 (43 runs)
High score: 86
Avg. score: 55.63
Avg. solves: 19.33
Avg. fails: 1.91

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12/11/2025 (32 runs)
High score: 74
Avg. score: 54.47
Avg. solves: 18.78
Avg. fails: 2.06

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12/12/2025 (39 runs)
High score: 68
Avg. score: 41.31
Avg. solves: 14.49
Avg. fails: 1.92

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12/13/2025 (36 runs)
High score: 73
Avg. score: 49.36
Avg. solves: 17.25
Avg. fails: 1.72

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Failed Puzzle Links

Any thoughts, suggestions, or advice on how to improve in Puzzle Racer would be greatly appreciated