Bullet Chess - Part 2 of The Pros and Cons Series!

Hey everyone! I'm Roger, and before I start I'd just like to say thank you to all my readers and supporters who helped me become a Top Blogger, I enjoy sharing my content during these times! If you have never read my blog then welcome! This blog is Part 2 of the Pros and Cons Series where I dive deep into the Pros and Cons of many different subjects. If you'd like to read Part 1 of the Series where I covered the Pros and Cons of PogChamps you can read that here: PogChamps - Part 1 of The Pros and Cons Series!

Thanks!

The Pros and Cons of Bullet Chess

Bullet Chess refers to games played with time controls that are faster than 3 minutes per player. The most common time controls of bullet chess are 1|0 and 2|1, sometimes it gets even faster in Hyper Bullet where 30-second chess and sometimes even 10-second chess is played. When we're talking about bullet there are two sides, either you think it's goofy and non-instructive or you think it helps your intuition and sense of threats. Most of the anti-bullet chess players are very strong chess coaches who are not involved in the entertainment side of chess (such as my coach). Many of these players know that Bullet Chess does not help whatsoever in Classical Time controls. Many of the players who play bullet know that bullet chess is not good for classical chess but they still play it since they are already extremely skilled at classical chess and are doing other sorts of studies outside of bullet chess such as World Blitz #1 Hikaru Nakamura. So let's dive deeper into both sides, these are the Pros and Cons of Bullet Chess. Enjoy!

Now bullet chess trains you to move impulsively, to skip calculation altogether. There's no way that your classical chess or USCF rating won't be hurt by that. Playing bullet chess will form a bad habit of moving quickly and rushing. However, one may argue that bullet chess is excellent at training your intuition, your sense that threats are lurking somewhere in the position. Which is important too. Wait, can't blitz do the same thing? Why play something like 2+1 when you can play 3+1? In 3+1 you still have very little time but just that one minute could allow you to play a more high-quality game and it still has the qualities of bullet chess. 

Bullet Chess has more Cons compared to Pros, but then how come guys like Andrew Tang still play mass amounts of hyper bullet. There is no such thing as bullet rating in USCF or FIDE so why do people play it? I decided to ask two of my friends  @1c6O-1  who has played around 15,000 bullet games on this site and @Sep-Gol (Go read his blog!) who believes bullet chess is harmful and bad for classical chess. Here's how they responded:

@1c6O-1 (Pro-Bullet) wrote:

Bullet has cons such as dirty flagging and premoves that don't help your chess. But it also has some pros such as it can help a lot with your opening, bullet is a time control where you can try aggressive openings or some that are safe. A lot of people just play it for fun, which is the main reason for it but if you want to make use of the time you play bullet, use it to learn new openings, some people even analyze bullet games to see what went wrong in the game, sometimes there are a lot of tactics you can spot which could help you with puzzle rush or puzzles.

@Sep-Gol (Anti-Bullet) wrote:

Even though bullet chess keeps you alert, it isn't chess. Why do we play chess? Just to lash out our moves and play non-sense, blundering our queens and saying aw-well, too bad, so sad. We play chess to enjoy the moves, we play to think about the moves, and we play to find hidden brilliancies. In bullet, games like Kasparov-Topalov wouldn't happen, because both players would flag. Bullet is foolish because it takes away all the instructive value of chess. In bullet, people can just say, "Oh no my queen!" And they fall for silly traps they wouldn't fall for in OTB chess. This is why bullet is not good. 

In my opinion, bullet chess is silly and it takes away all the instructive value of chess. Now before you go into the comment section and tell me about how I've played 500 games of bullet, those were when I played during the Not-So Pro Bullet Chess League, calm down I will be quitting bullet. Here's a side by side comparison between a game played by arguably the best bullet player Andrew Tang and a classical game played by Kasparov and Topalov which is what @Sep-Gol stated in his argument.

You can see a huge difference between these games in quality. Sure maybe you're not Kasparov and you can't play what he did against Topalov but if you want to improve don't play silly bullet games that only come down to time. Here's my word of advice, if you're trying to go from 1000-1500 then make sure to stop playing bullet. Every single Grandmaster will tell you at that level to never play bullet. Play Rapid! Rapid is much more instructive than bullet. 

Thanks for reading, feel free to debate about this topic in the comments! Stay tuned for Part 3 of this series, and adios.