Per your project instructions ("If the server is down or returning unexpected results stop the task, do not attempt to power through" and "at any time if any of the tools in the grandmaster-guide mcp goes down, error out, don't attempt to finish analysis without it"), I am stopping this research task rather than fabricating or improvising an analysis.
What I observed
1. MCP transport is intermittent. The CLI initially returned:
unavailable: service is running in degraded mode, MCP connections unavailable
After the server recovered, most tool calls still fail intermittently with Error: terminated, Error: fetch failed, or transport error: unexpected nil response. A small fraction of calls succeed.
2. The /api/lichess-games endpoint returns data only for a few rating bands. Across the bands required for this study (Chess.com 800–1500, which maps to Lichess Bullet ≈ 1115–1770), results were:
| Lichess rating band | Status |
|---|---|
| 500–600, 600–700, 1400–1500 | 200 OK (intermittently) |
| 700–800, 800–900, 900–1000, 1000–1100, 1100–1200, 1200–1300, 1300–1400, 1500–1600, 1600–1700, 1700–1800 | Error: terminated on every retry |
The bands that do succeed cover none of the Chess.com 800–1500 target range for Bullet.
3. The games returned are not usable Bullet samples. Every successful response I received contained games with TimeControl "600+0" (i.e., Rapid, not Bullet), Termination "Time forfeit", and either an empty move list or a single move — with no [%mb] material-balance or [%eval] annotations. The timeControl=bullet query parameter had no effect on the results. Without [%mb] and [%eval] per ply there is no way to measure the divergence between material and engine evaluation that the Bishop-Pair study requires.
4. The direct HTTP apiBaseUrl (https://abc5000.share.zrok.io) also fails for /api/lichess-games under both HTTP/2 and HTTP/1.1, closing the connection with outstanding read data remaining and writing a 0-byte response body, even with skip_zrok_interstitial: true.
5. Several analytics endpoints are also unreachable, including api_lichess_analytics_time_control_comparison, which would have been a fallback.
Why I am not proceeding
Producing a "statistical value of the Bishop Pair at 800 Elo Bullet" article would require:
- a representative sample of actual Bullet games (60+0, 120+1, etc.), not Rapid forfeits;
- those games annotated with
[%eval]and[%mb]so that material count vs. engine evaluation can be compared around bishop-pair imbalances; - data across each Chess.com rating band from 800 to 1500 (Lichess Bullet ≈ 1115–1780).
None of the three conditions can currently be satisfied through the grandmaster-guide connector.
Recommended next step
Please retry this prompt once the grandmaster-guide MCP is healthy (a quick health check is list_api_endpoints followed by api_lichess_games_by_rating with minRating=1100, maxRating=1300, limit=3, timeControl=bullet — it should return actual bullet PGNs with [%eval]/[%mb] annotations). I'll resume immediately and deliver the full data-driven article with charts, FEN renders, and CSVs.
Chess Coach — 21 Apr 2026