Does bullet help your chess game/skill?

Controversial question here: does bullet (1+0, etc) help you with your overall chess game in blitz and rapid, as well as help develop your chess skill?

Or, do you feel like it builds bad habits and hurts your rapid and more serious chess goals?

Personally, I feel like it’s a bit of both. For me, bullet has absolutely helped me with my board vision, as well as seeing so many games and pieces it has definitely helped me understand tactics better and quicker than I feel I would have through traditional chess. I see so much more. For example, with 14 seconds left and my opponent has a light square bishop, I can quickly and instinctively keep my pieces off white squares. This sometimes translates over to rapid games where I can assess it the same way. So, in a way, much of what I’ve learned in bullet has actually helped me in rapid.

On the other hand, I’ll be the first to admit your patience and concentration takes a hit because of bullet. Going from 100+ bullet games daily to a handful of rapid is tough, and some of those bad habits come out to hurt you. Positions in bullet are simply not deep enough to be compared to a rapid game.

Still, Im personally in the boat that bullet does have a lot of good things for chess players, especially new and intermediate players. Maybe I’m wrong. Especially for newer players, it feels like bullet could be a fun way to get rid of jitters and expectations and just relax and figure it out as you go.

What do y’all think?

… also the reason I wanted to make this thread was cuz I hit 1700 bullet today

Bullet is a game of mouse speed and internet speed and premoving ability, therefore it's not real chess and ruins your ability to play long time controls.

My philosophy is that classical helps with calculation, blitz builds intuition, rapid trains some of both, and bullet is useful for neither.

It's definitely fun to play bullet, and it can definitely help with niche things like reading your opponent's psychology and predicting their moves as well as helps with speeding up calculation, but the many downsides are not worth it in my opinion to use bullet as a training tool.

helps with time trouble ig

After playing a lot of bullet (20+ games like usual) I play really bad in Blitz, but it doesnt affect my rapid play much. Like you said, the bad habits of flagging and stuff from Bullet affect me a lot while playing Blitz because Blitz is also short-time chess.

Congrats on 1700 btw! :0

Yesnt

I feel like it harms my mindset because I stop thinking about my opponents candidate moves and only focus on one to evaluate… but it makes me able to find tactics quickly and exploit common mistakes without thinking all that much. It also makes me very conscious of my own playing strength because I can see how I can dominate someone who may be hundreds of points above me simply because they don’t know the position as well, so I’m caring less about rating of opponents in other time controls. It helps confidence but harms my thought process.

Bullet chess is still chess, but the less time you give both players, then the less quality their play will usually be.

When you are trying to improve at anything, you typically want better quality and by that mindset, then rapid and longer time controls are better for learning. Bullet accentuates the main risk of playing blitz - which is conditioning your mind to move too quickly as you calculate less and don't evaluate as many candidate moves.

For most people, I would assert that blitz does more harm than good and especially for bullet it does more harm than good. Keep in mind, I said "most people." There are ways to use speed chess to your improvement benefit (speed chess including bullet), but this means avoiding the bad habits of bullet and usually combining it with longer time control games.