Seems bullet is popular?

Hi,

I could be wrong, but it seems bullet is a surprisingly common tc for what it entails. I would see <1000 rapids play it quite a bit. Out of my 5 chess.com friends who are 1900+ rapid, 3 are also 2000+ bullet.

I play bullet because I find it fun (it is a tc where my rating varies a ton haha), but am surprised at what seems like (from my limited observation) its popular appeal. I feel it is quite different from any other type of chess except maybe arguably blitz without increment, because no matter what your skill level you need to be able to click fast, flag, etc. to perform well. I wonder why it seems players of a variety of skill levels like to play bullet and, in the case of those three 1900+ rapids I mentioned, get it up to a level matching their other tc's. Is my observation correct, and if so, why? Is there any prestige attached to bullet in the chess world?

@1

More like cheating paranoia.

It's not as prestigious as other time controls, but it's generally pretty fun, and it especially fun if one is a fast thinker. Bullet is also easy to gain rating in.

For me I find few things in chess more satisfying than finding a brilliant tactic in bullet chess. It sort of confirms for me that my practice and endless tactics studying can actually pay off. I also feel like at the higher levels of bullet (over 2000), I am not seeing flagging as often. Players at this level can convert a win when they are even just 1 pawn up even if they have just 15 seconds left in an endgame. It's a test of how well you know your openings (no time to sit and figure it out) and creating strong spaces for my pieces that makes my oponent have a difficult time with piece placement. Space wins. It is also really good practice for when you are in fact playing blitz or even rapid with no increment. In those games, there are a ton of times when I have under a minute left after using the rest of my time to garner an advantage. Knowing I am a 2100 bullet player makes me confident I can convert that win as I've played full games in under a minute before. 

@BenjiTeachesChess Wow, thanks for sharing!! This is mindblowing. I guess I assumed that speed is always important solely because I find it quite hard to click fast enough (especially on mobile), but I see from what you are saying that bullet skills depend a lot on actual chess as well at 2000+.

I also see what @tygxc is saying about cheating, as it is hard to cheat in bullet lol.

But yeah I also see the appeal of never being stuck in the game for more than a short period of time.

I actually play on a trackpad too a fair amount of the time so I guess for the most part I get outclicked, but moving in 0.2 seconds vs 0.4 seconds when clicking usually doesn't determine the game. If you think about it, most games are fewer than 60 moves. That means you have an average of 1 second per move and a second is actually a good amount of time if you have already thought about the move while your opponent is making his.

I'm just blown away how you can have such a thorough understanding of the board that you can feel 1 second is a fairly long time; thanks for explaining!

Bullet chess is the most addictive thing there is, in the long run it will hurt your game in general, when you try to stop playing bullet chess it will be difficult for you to play other time modes again, because you will feel bored. It will be much more difficult for you to try to study chess efficiently again. If your case is that you are not interested in studying the game and improving, then there is no problem with playing bullet, but if your case is that you want to progress as a player, I recommend you avoid bullet chess as much as possible.

yes

Haha I play bullet, and enjoy it, and don't find it addictive. Nor do I find other tc "boring" in the slightest. I have hundreds of bullets in like a month, but mostly just play on and off when I don't want to lock into a full rapid.

You only have 800 bullet games, you still haven't reached the point where it becomes addictive. If you really want to improve at some point, you better stop playing bullet games before it's too late.

@DejaDeJugarBlitz

First of all, I don't know why you believe 800 bullet games within only like 1.5 months is a small amount of bullet games. But more importantly, I find it hard to imagine being addicted to bullet given I care about actual chess lol and at my level of bullet I still get away with things like piece hanging, flag, etc. I play bullet as a break sometimes but I consider rapid much more important.

That's the problem that even if you consider classical and blitz chess more important than bullet chess, you might impulsively end up playing blitz more than anything else.
800 bullet games in a month is nothing, actually in 20 minutes you can play around 9 bullet games, so it's very easy to accumulate that number of games playing at that rate of time.
In three days it is very easy to play close to 500 bullet games and there are people who in a single day have played around 250 or even much more than that.

Here you have more examples.

https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/i-want-to-quit-but-i-cant-what-is-wrong-with-me

https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/how-to-stop-playing-bullet

I don't think it's hard to find more, there's more of this on the forums, it only took me 10 seconds to find these two.

No, but it's fun.

The first example doesn't refer to bullet specifically. The second is a person rated hundreds of points higher than me. As I said, at my level, bullet is often quite nonsensical and it seems rather difficult to be addicted to lol. Regardless, thanks for your thoughts.

.

I agree that the higher the level, bullet chess has more negative effects, but that does not mean that it does not harm your level; For example your brain gets used to a reward effect based on doing nonsense nonsense, gaining dopamine that way can't be good for your chess. If the only thing you want is to have fun and you don't even care about classical chess, that's fine, but if the opposite is the case, bullet chess doesn't do you any good.