theres a bug in my bullet: the case of the teleporting king
there was a brief, unexpected bug on chess dot com a couple days ago that u might think wouldnt affect much, but for a new 100 elo like me it was decisive.
the day started out normal. id been doing 10min games, but mostly me or my opponent would lose on time.
u would think then id decide to go for longer games where us slow bads could have enough time to remember how the pieces move.
instead i decided to try bullet. i thought if i could just learn to up my pace a bit, then i could go back to 10 minute games.
i started with some beginners luck and stumbled into a backrank checkmate by accident.
so far so good.
but in my next couple games, i found myself staring and waiting for the opponents next move, only to realize it was my clock running down. i somehow missed that the opponent had moved.
and this happened again, and again, and again.
after a few games i took a minute to ask myself why i was having this problem now, but not in the first game. was my brain overloaded? am i just that bad?
and then, at one point i thought i saw my opponents king teleport across the board.
finally i wondered: could there be a bug?
and it turned out that yes there was, tho it wasnt what i thought.
this is a lesson in how important user interface is, because the bug was that for a short time the chess board options changed to different settings. chess dot com fixed this pretty quickly which is good of them. but at the time i was so focused on trying to do moves in bullet time that i didnt even notice the board was different after my first game!
im sure u get used to this, but i find bright high contrast checkerboard patterns to be unpleasant to look at. its like im looking at an optical illusion or something, u know, like:
the eye brain just does weird things when confronted with this sort of pattern. its very distracting.
so one of the first things i did when i joined this website was to chang my settings to have a lower contrast board, and let the pieces pop out from the total background:
without move animations, sound cues, or my usual board, suddenly all the moves were invisible to me. if i blink i miss it. if i stare at one spot too hard i miss it.
at my level, i can only focus on a few squares within a short time, and theres a fog over the rest. so if a white king on a black square suddenly disappears, i might catch that it disappeared if im looking right at it, but not see where it reappeared.
well, on this fateful day, with no time to move and barely knowing how chess works, the closest thing my eye brain could find that looked like a king was my own king, and so my brain interpreted it as a teleporting king.
heres an exaggerated depiction:
my takeaway is that 32 pieces is a lot of pieces to look at at once, but i know with practice i will get the hang of it!
its just one more goal for my list.
- remember the king can take pieces
- remember to move the king two spaces to castle
- remember which side is which so i know which way the pawns go
- see all the pieces at the same time
thank u for reading my blog post 
