Bullet Strategy

Good memory is vital to chess skill. Those that equate eidetic memory with good memory reveal their ignorance of the science of memory, and their ignorance of the science of chess skill.

I'll take it that you are speaking from introspection.

Wrong again.

Lol if you don't think that board vision is important for chess then also strength is not important for weight lifting, etc etc.

I did not say that board vision is unimportant. Quite the contrary.

You are wrong again because you continue to misunderstand and misrepresent what I have said about eidetic memory.

I understand it to mean " marked by or involving extraordinarily accurate and vivid recall especially of visual images ". Yes I realize that you mean that chess memory has to do with organization and patterning of images but you refuse to realize that some people just have a better crude visual (or audial) memory than others.

I do not dispute "that some people just have a better crude visual (or audial) memory than others." I dispute the contention that it confers an advantage in the development of chess skill. Many studies, going back to the origins of the science of psychology and continuing into the modern era of the cognitive sciences, have sought a link. The evidence so far has been overwhelmingly negative.

You might start, for instance, with "Visuospatial abilities of chess players" by
Andrew J. Waters, Fernand Gobet, and Gerv Leyden, British Journal of Psychology (2002), 93, 557–565:

The extent to which the acquisition of expertise in knowledge-rich domains, such as chess, can be influenced by general individual characteristics, such as intelligence, has remained unclear. Some previous studies with children have documented significant correlations between chess skill and performance on some psychometric tests, such as performance IQ. However, we found no evidence for a correlation between chess skill and visual memory ability in a group of adult chess players (N = 36, age = 28.4 years). This finding, together with other data in the literature, suggests that there is surprisingly little evidence that chess skill and visuospatial ability are associated in adults. Thus,
visual memory ability, and perhaps visuospatial intelligence, may be relatively
unimportant factors in the long-term acquisition of chess skill. (author's abstract)

That's intersting, I always assumed if I could visualize my calculations more clearly I'd easily be hundreds of points stronger -- but thinking again, I guess all the time during the calculation you have to give values to the moves/squares/pieces as you go along, so supreme visuospatial memory may not help a lot after all.

I'd say success in bullet is based upon:

- Experience playing bullet chess

- Memory, pattern recognization skill

- Ability to decide your move extremely fast and predict opponent's move

- Being good at chess in general

Sometimes random moves work. Black has a mate in one, but White won on time.

I can't understand how your opponent didn't see what was coming after 2. Qf3. Any bullet player who is at all experienced would. A bit more cunning way to go about is 2. Bc4 and now 3. Qf3 or 3. Qh5 can catch someone who premoves or moves automatically.

I'm fairly certain that he didn't look. Rather, he was probably using premove in the opening without looking, as Loomis referred to in post #4 as an inadvisable strategy.

I also suspect that players favoring this manner play only for rating points--rather worthless currency--and in this game the rating differential meant that such error was small punishment. By running me out of time in the earlier game, the "gains" were huge (and without decent play called for).

Of course, if rating were my objective, I should not play someone so much lower. But, I want a quick game, and I'll take the highest rated seek in the time control I want. Most games are against lower rateds, and many with this huge gap.

Quite a few players wait a long time before the first move and use other clock strategies with limited success. In a recent game, I completely outplayed an opponent and had 11 seconds to his five. Somehow, his random premoves burnt my last eleven seconds off the clock before I mated him, and with only 1/2 second coming off his clock. In three minute blitz, or even two minute bullet, these players have no chance. In one minute, they do surprisingly well.

Blits has it's moments...but it really is akin to "quantity" as opposed to "quality".

You can easily win...not by quality moves but, by crowding the board making the opponent think more, also when it comes down to crunch time in terms of time, just play faster (premove) not necessarily good moves because most of these games end in time anyway.

It really is useless as a leaning tool...I won a game on time where my opponent had me cornered and about to checkmate me...did I feel good...no...because I knew it was just an artificial win...I really lost the chess match...but was the fastest in "pushing wood"...I was playing the wrong game.

The quick mate miniatures aren't too uncommon. If you play a bunch of games against someone who likes to move their f-pawn in the opening, you start to get the hang of needling the weakness, a-la

What about a 3rd possibility? Perhaps a universal formation, i.e., Moody's Universal Attack. Do you have any examples of this strategy so I can pre-move the first eight moves and survive?

1. Games always start very slowly. Always. I guess this is a server problem.

2. It may well be multiple premoves, which here are accepted. There shouldn't be such things (and I suspect that many delays in the endgame are due to both players making multiple premoves).

Musikamole, I don't recommend a formation like that.

At best you save 2-3 seconds in the opening by moving slightly faster than your opponent. But now you allow white to take the initiative. And it is much easier to play faster when you have the initiative. At some point white will choose to attack and you have to defend correctly.

I've seen mutual premoves add as much as a minute to a one minute game, perhaps more--it can seem like forever, and I know that the last ten seconds take longer than the first fifty.

I dont recommend premoving more than 2 moves in the opening as your opponent can screw you up... There was a 1750ish bullet player I played and he premoved like the first 5 or 6 moves. He always fianchettoed his kingside bishop and moved e4 or d4.... well after 2 games, I figured he was going to do the samething - fianchetto + premove first 4 - 6 moves... and here is what happened:

This has happened many times. I've done this with success at least 20 - 30 times because there are many people out there who premove the first few moves...

There was another guy who premoved a lot and here is what happened on our 3rd or 4th game:

Don't premove too much in the opening :)