With help from someone in the community I met on Discord, I downloaded my duel stats and started running my own analytics.
I looked for the countries I was missing most often and found Slovakia topped the list — I only got it right 38% of the time.
But look closer. Most of my Slovakia misses landed next door — Czechia, Poland, Austria, Hungary, Croatia. Near-misses like that don't cost much in a duel.
On the other hand, I identified the USA correctly over 95% of the time.
But some of those correct guesses were over 1,000 miles off, like this one where I guessed Massachusetts on an Arkansas location.
I stopped ranking countries by miss rate and started ranking them by blunder rate — guess off by more than 500 miles.
Just over half of my blunders were in countries I'd correctly identified. These countries were the largest, best-covered ones on the map:
- Brazil
- United States
- Russia
- Australia
- Canada
- Indonesia
- Mexico
- India
I looked for the countries I was missing most often and found Slovakia topped the list — I only got it right 38% of the time.
I looked for the countries I was missing most often and found Slovakia topped the list — I only got it right 38% of the time.
But look closer. Most of my Slovakia misses landed next door — Czechia, Poland, Austria, Hungary, Croatia. Near-misses like that don't cost much in a duel.
On the other hand, I identified the USA correctly over 95% of the time.
On the other hand, I identified the USA correctly over 95% of the time.
But some of those correct guesses were over 1,000 miles off, like this one where I guessed Massachusetts on an Arkansas location.
I stopped ranking countries by miss rate and started ranking them by blunder rate — guess off by more than 500 miles.
I stopped ranking countries by miss rate and started ranking them by blunder rate — guess off by more than 500 miles.
Just over half of my blunders were in countries I'd correctly identified. These countries were the largest, best-covered ones on the map:
- Brazil
- United States
- Russia
- Australia
- Canada
- Indonesia
- Mexico
- India
I stopped ranking countries by miss rate and started ranking them by blunder rate — guess off by more than 500 miles.
Just over half of my blunders were in countries I'd correctly identified. These countries were the largest, best-covered ones on the map:
- Brazil
- United States
- Russia
- Australia
- Canada
- Indonesia
- Mexico
- India
So I turned that insight into a curriculum. For most of 2025, I studied almost nothing but Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, Australia, the United States, Mexico, Canada, and India — along with Europe, which I treated as one more enormous country.
Each week, I chose one country and gave it my entire 45-minute morning window. I played practice maps on repeat and documented every clue I found. Then, the next week, I moved on.
There's an obvious objection to all of this. The best GeoGuessr players in the world aren't specialists. They're generalists — equally dangerous in Chile, Turkey, South Africa, Japan, Thailand, wherever the game sends them. A curriculum built around eight countries sounds like a good way to become excellent at eight countries and mediocre at the other hundred and ninety.
I knew this going in, so I didn't actually go all-in on Brazil during Brazil week, or the US during US week. After every duel, win or lose, I still logged whatever I'd missed — insulator ridges in southern Thailand, winter coverage in southern Chile, wind farms near Gqeberha, South Africa — into the same running Google Doc I'd kept since moving into Champion.
The plan worked. My ELO climbed throughout 2025. Not evenly, and not everywhere. Russia never got easier. But on balance, across eight countries and fifty-two weeks, I was blundering less than I used to.
The average fell in all eight countries.
I kept telling myself I wasn't trying to become world-class — only better than whoever was standing across from me in a duel, and better than I'd been a month earlier.
Mostly, that was true.
By the end of 2025 — a year and a half after I first subscribed — I was sitting at 1,696. Squarely in Champion and still climbing at my own pace.
It would not stay that way.