Is bullet useful?

The best description of bullet i have heard is this...

Bullet chess is speed reading.  Your comprehension goes way down, but at least you finish before anyone else.

Where as slow long time control chess is sitting back and enjoying a good book.

Well, my position often becomes a mess even in blitz. That's why I never play bullet.

As a guitarist, I keep on telling aspiring musicians that speed is a byproduct of accuracy. Many beginning guitarists, especially the younger ones, want to be as good as their idols and try to play like Slash, Jimmi Hendrickx etc. They fail miserably because they want to move their fingers as quick as possible over the fret board rather than focussing on the correct technique. They forget that their idols once were beginners too and worked hard for many years, adopting the correct finger settings and knowledge about their instrument.

It's the same with bullet and speed chess. Even though these forms of chess can be fun and to some degree might improve your skills, it's better (in my opinion) to adopt the classic way of learning. It's slower, but at least you want pick up as many bad habbits... Improving your chess is hard work regardless of the level you're at and I agree with Paper Omega that playing bullet doesn't contribute as much as the more traditional ways.

A very relevant and wise analogy, thanks

bullet = improvement?

ah....No.  Like the great Magnus says, perhaps you can play the Riffs right-  it is amusing to play them real fast.  

the lower you are, the sillier it is.

Well, what about the improved ability to recognise patterns and spot tactics?

I'm not a coach or a strong master, but most of them emphasize slow chess with low rated chessplayers.

so To each his own...

When you learned how to read, were you taught how to speed read, or were you taught the ABC's and how words sounded first?

This isn't about bullet vs classical, rather the benefits/detractors of bullet itself.

Bullet is fine as long as youre not trying to improve at your regular chess game.  If youre a newbie, low rated player, or someone trying to be as good as they can be, then bullet instills bad habits and should be avoided, just as any time control under 30 minutes.

Yeah. Bullet really has no benefit in the context of classical chess.

if u wanna get better at bullet, play bullet. if u wanna get better at blitz, play blitz, if u wanna get better at classical, play classical.

Maybe not bullet, but I recall Dan Heisman writing in one of his books that beginners should spend about 10% of their time playing blitz.  In fact, he mentioned it was one piece of advice that he gave his students that was often not followed (because the students feel that it's not "real" chess).  IIRC, some of the benefits were that you would learn time management, how to quickly recognize patterns for when you are in time trouble, and you can rapidly try out lots of different openings.  One caviat was that you should play with the same time delay as you do in your serious games.  So if that's a 5 second increment for example, you should play blitz with a 5 second increment.

Granted, that's still 90% of your time on slow games, but Heisman seems to think that there is some benefit.

No, no, no!

Useful for what?

If you read the description of this forum maybe you'd know

That's an interesting perspective actually. I mean it's hard to play 90% slow games at an amateur level due to time constraints and convenience, but I definitely agree that to seriously progress one needs to really analyse their slower games.

Or maybe I wouldn't, since the original post provided no further information.

It's okay you'll catch up with everyone else eventually,