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To Play or not to Play? Bullet Chess the ups and downs

To Play or not to Play? Bullet Chess the ups and downs

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Verne9
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As the bullet championship wraps up people are even more asking whether or not you should play bullet. Is bullet bad for your chess skills? This blog is not to provide the ultimate answer but instead to explain what I think about it.

  • Bullet Championship
  • Is Bullet bad for you
  • If you do want to play bullet how do you get better.
  • Chess Clocks

These are a few of the things we will be discussing here.

 Bullet Championship:

Just a few days ago the 2021 Bullet Chess Championship ended with Firouzja! coming out on top.

Firouzja has been destroying the last few tournaments he has played in two Titled Tuesdays in a row.)

I hope that everyone was keeping track of what was happening and were watching the games and streams (I was.) 

Here is a game from the finals against Andrew Tang. With that lets start talking about Bullet helping or hurting your chess.

Is Bullet bad for you?:


Often people just get hooked into bullet chess, but is it really good for your chess skills? Often I have found that it is hard to adjust back to slower time controls after playing really fast ones (bullet,  hyperbullet). I play in a bullet arena and it makes me play faster chess for the rest of the day which may or may not be a good thing (probably not.)

If you do want to play bullet how do you get better?:

One of the main things to try to do is do lots of puzzle rush and lots of puzzle battle 

This really helps you play a lot faster and get better at your tactics. I often use these features and Chesskid's original puzzle duel (yes that is right puzzle duel was first.)Also play lots and lots of bullet!

As everyone knows practice makes perfect. So in the end probably the best thing to do is play bullet.

 Chess Clocks and what time control:

If you read the name you should know this is about bullet. But does bullet include hyperbullet? and  should you even play hyperbullet? Hyper bullet is often just a mess. Hikaru Nakamura and all those titled players who are awesome at bullet may be able to play it really well because their brains can calculate it really fast but when I play it not so much. Here is the classic 30 sec game.

These two chess players are fine chess players there rating is not 200. True they may have a way to grow but they are not awe full. These two players play perfectly fine longer time controls. 

Now lets talk a little more about chess clocks. At first time controls such as bullet were not very common but now over the years they have become a lot more popular. Then the pandemic hit and there were a lot more people playing chess including bullet. Here is a picture of one of the earlier chess clocks.

With that lets stop and go back to playing bullet, not reading about it. Oh yes and if you loved this blog follow me for me for more great ones. 

Thanks, 

@Verne9