A discussion spot for bullet haters

Whenever I come to a profile of a fanatic bullet player, I see that this person got overloaded by comments hitting on the lower end of fairplay.

But what I think is really intriguing comes to the less insulting comments with the subject of: "This person just plays on time."

If I think of my own bullet wins, a high number of victories I got by winning on time. Sure, the less time you have for a game, the greater are the chances that the game ends with a time ko. So basically, if you agree in playing a one minute game, you already agree to a high probability of having a time-related end set to it.

Two points have come to my mind regarding the question if bullet chess is an own chess version. My point is: "Yes it is" and to explain this I will focus on the two main aspects of the chess game, strategy and tactics.

Bullet strategy:

In a normal chess game, a good strategy accounts to the best positioning of pieces given the structure of the game (and possible later structures), which clearly involves in the decision of piece exchange. Since bullet chess depends on time as a rare resource, a good strategy in bullet envoques about time play. In the later course of the game, the player who has an attack against the king is clearly in advantage, even if in normal chess the attack fails.

 In this position with little time and white to move, checks on the seventh and eight rank give him a strategic bullet advantage! The reason is that he can switch even to diagonal attacks, requesting a time loss for black when having expected horizontal ones.

Is this unfair? No, from my point of view. Bullet chess follows it's own strategic rules and they involve this time play criterion.

Bullet tactics:

Since bullet is, in terms of game theory, more a simultaneous than a sequential game (as chess in it's pure form), bullet tactics defer from chess tactics in the way that they take this speciality into account.

In normal chess, this which is considered by me a "bullet tactic" would have never worked, but here saved black half a point.

Hmm, so you're saying Rd8 is a bullet tactic. I guess so.

When I would play bullet I remember your brain automatically keeps a list of all possible threats. So for example after 3.Ke4 white would be aware of Re1 and Rd8. One bullet strategy/tactic is to pre-move a response if it can deal with all threats.

In that position, when there are two threats, white could premove Qb7 and then pick up the king and hover Kf5. No matter black's move your next will come nearly instantly.

I think this is a common strategy/tactic.

I've seen Rench put a piece en pris attacking an opponents piece because it was a move his opponent wouldn't expect and led to him winning a piece in time pressure. It's a really impressive skill to play bullet well.

Time is a crucial element of bullet. Nakamura in his book criticises a move that wins a queen, because it took the player ~10 seconds to spot it.

Yeah, the unexpected suicide moves can be excellent.

I think his Rd8 example would be better if it were undefended. Because in that case if I were white I really may have premoved Kf5 to avoid the check and now I lose my queen.

The suicide moves aren't usually used by lower rated bullet players.

That's the point and yes, you can love or hate this game as any game.

It is actually ridiculous to insult your opponent in a bullet game as a time player :P

Bobby Fischer was right: "Blitz chess is for morons".

I hate how they always hit everyone in the shoulder, and then you have to get a doctor to pull it out before it gets infected.

Don't get me started on hollow points; the only thing worse than them is the dum-dums.

I like rootbeer-flavoured dum dums. But the orange ones not so much.

Love those playwords, impossible in Spanish. :)

It always annoyed me that my blitz/standard and online ratings were above 1600 and my bullet was below 1200 even though bullet does not equal good chess ability. But then I started playing 2|1 games which are classified under bullet rating even though after 60 moves (easy to achieve this many moves in a game) the time control is longer than that of a 3|0 blitz game. My bullet rating is still 200 below my other ratings but at least it's not as bad as it was before.

Im still one of those people that criticises one minute bullet games but I can't ignore the fact that titled players and above 2000 players generally have a good bullet rating to match

     "Is it true what they say about your bullets"?---Madaline Kahn

It's twoo!  It's weally twoo!

Many top chess players(like Kramnik)who play blitz don't play bullet. They think bullet chess is sily. Even Nakamura does not think bullet is chess.

Winning on time isn't unfair or unsportsmanlike..in any form of chess.

lolurspammed wrote:

Winning on time isn't unfair or unsportsmanlike..in any form of chess.

As much as I hate getting flagged and no matter how much it out rages me, you are correct.

I do believe in dead drawn positions (rook vs rook for example) it is very rude to play several minutes for a win.

Not only did Fischer not say this, he won... well, dominated, the first super strong blitz tournament ever, losing only one game.

There was some quote about how in that tournament other players had games where they dropped pawns (players like Tal, Petrosian, Korchnoi, et al) while FIscher didn't blunder anything.

Many top chess players do not take rapid, blitz and bullet chess as seriously as they do chess with standard time controls. Some dismissive quotes from top chess players on the topic of it are the following:

• "Playing rapid chess, one can lose the habit of concentrating for several hours in serious chess. That is why, if a player has big aims, he should limit his rapidplay in favour of serious chess." – Vladimir Kramnik^[31]
• "Yes, I have played a blitz game once. It was on a train, in 1929." – Mikhail Botvinnik^[31]
• "He who analyses blitz is stupid." – Rashid Nezhmetdinov^[31]
• "Blitz chess kills your ideas." – Bobby Fischer^[31]
• "To be honest, I consider [bullet chess] a bit moronic, and therefore I never play it." – Vladimir Kramnik^[32]
• "Blitz – it's just a pleasure." – Vladimir Kramnik^[33]
• "I play way too much blitz chess. It rots the brain just as surely as alcohol." – Nigel Short^[34]
• "Blitz is simply a waste of time." – Vladimir Malakhov^[35]

In other words: It's for fools!

See, isn't that better than making up quotes

Of course tournament time controls are more serious. But as you can see they all seem to enjoy playing varying time controls for fun.

And that Botvinnik never played speed chess is something of a myth. Taimanov gave an interview saying Botvinnik requested some blitz games with him for the purpose of training.

These quotes are all interesting, but all the players mentioned above are/were very strong Blitz players. Three quotes by Kramnik.... who did QUITE well in the Blitz World Championship just about a week ago, in which the strongest in the world participated and he medalled (Bronze I think? Or was it Silver?).

Bullet is another story, and yes, even patzers like myself sometimes watch some of the greatest chess players on earth at the end of a Bullet game just making HORRENDOUS moves, mostly premoves, blundering pieces left and right when they are both just trying to flag eachother.

In my humble (and patzer-ish!) opinion the increment avoids this and is the solution to all this problems, plus the whining at the end of matches "you time player!". Play with a 2 second increment. If you are TRULY skilled, you can win a very big percentage of the "winning" endgames even if you just have 3 seconds left but a two second increment. I know guys like Grischuk can deliver bishop+knight checkmate with that much time because he has done similar. This, in comparisson to the finale of most bullet games of Grand Masters when each has less than, say, 7-8 seconds left, is MUCH more exciting to see, because chances of blundering a whole rook or queen are much less, AND, most importantly, this (very silly) so-called "bullet tactics" in which you give 3-4 checks in a row and suddenly place your rook in an unprotected square, in front of the opponent's queen, in hopes of him having pre-moved his king once more avoiding the checks, and then capturing the queen for free, just would not work!

Everyone who has watched Titled Tuesdays has witnessed this. Complicated endgames are played out and the very skilled wont blunder stuff and silly tactics wont work. I remember a GM, I believe it was Daniel Friedman, who had an endgame with two knights vs. a pawn... I knew from reading a bit that depending on where the opponent's pawn is, this is either a win or a draw; since the pawn was not very far advanced I thought to myself "it should be a win, but can he do it?", he definitely had less than a minute left but the 2 seconds increment, and believe me, watching him deliver that mate was awesome! I loved that moment and know I could not do it.

What usually happens if a super strong player obtains a COMPLETELY winning advantage but has, say, 5 seconds left? Think of rook+knight vs. rook, or queen vs. rook, or several connected pawns vs. a lone piece, stuff that you know is a win but you have 5 seconds and no increment? These endings, without an increment, are usually very silly. The losing side can have a possition that the computer may evaluate +10 for the opponent, but he starts giving random, silly checks, then he playes some weird, unexpected moves, like sacrificing every piece left on the board.. some checks and silly moves and maybe by now the evaluation is +20 for the opponent but he flags. This, in my view, is unfortunate. If you have such a winning possition even with 2 seconds left, instead of losing due to silly pre-moves, it is best to be allowed to show your skill and try to win it with the increment! It is much more thrilling than the blunder-fest that most finishes without increment are.

Just my (long) two cents. :)