The quark condensate is calculated using the effective‐action formalism, by imposing an ansatz for the Wilson loop, which interpolates between the area‐law for large loops and the area‐squared law for small loops. For 3 colors and 2 light flavors, a lower bound of 460 MeV for the constituent quark mass is found to be accessible, provided an effective scale‐dependent string tension of a light quark falls off linearly with the Schwinger proper time. This behavior of the effective string tension yields the Hausdorff dimension of a light‐quark trajectory equal to 4, which shows that these trajectories are similar to branched polymers. A gluonic chain based on such trajectories provides an example of a model describing weak first‐order deconfinement phase transition, which takes place in SU(3) Yang–Mills theory.