Why do people play 1 minute game?

I love it.   I wish I would have thought of that bon mot.  Yes, definitely the best one yet, VeggieEater. 

In other words you didn't read it, ok.

More amazingly, you're working hard to demonize things you don't understand. And frustratingly to me, work to divide the whole world into strict ideologies. One one side, we have people who cherish life and culture. Other other, deviants who are anti-life and anti-culture... it's almost comedic.

Speed chess is hardly allegorical... the best speed players are the ones who are very good at standard time controls. In speed games they're showing the immense work they've done on the game and their talent.

Playing 1 min bullet is the quickest way to destroy anyones big ego and improve your own. People say they play it for fun, but true is every single game everybody fight like their life dephend on it. There is extreme agression, nervers, big ego involved, and pure joy when you demolish your opponent game after game and prove you the better than him. Or the "mental orgasm" when you jump ahead fighting equal opponent. 

GM Hikaru Nakamura has a book for bullet and he once said smth like ~ I get mad if i lose on bullet than on blitz.

Once you start playing bullet is hard to stop. It's more addicted than blitz. You got to play a lot of games in short period of time. Everyone wants some quick wins on chess, to prove something...

It's a lot of fun also if you don't care anymore like me. Get big rating then start toying with lower rated for fun - like moving king and still win.

It has some pluses - you get a lof of patterns, openings.. your brain have to adjust quickly to the new position and spot every single threat, hanging pieces etc, you improve your automatic blunder check/visualization etc. But at the same time a lot of disadvantages like no deep calculation , garbage sacs, and many just blunder huge at endgames, becouse of premoving or lack of skills.

Some users say 1 min is not chess, but same time playing 3 min blitz...which is very close almost the same really, just less premoving. You can play also 2+1 or 1+2 which is better than 3/0.

I don't see any Bullet rating for you, so by default you must be the expert.

I was talking of psychology and cultural patterns and processes, and you seem to miss the importance of both.  Culture is not something I say with my nose in the air, I use the word as a cultural anthropologist would, namely a description of anything based on the symbolic process that determines the manners and mores of a people.  In other words, it's the A stands for B in a society rather than the A equals B of the signal reaction.

Culture affects everything within a given society, and I do mean everything.  Most people have no idea just how much it does so, and they would be shocked to find their own behaviors and often their own personality shaped by the culture to which they belong.  We now live in a culture where extremes are the norm; there is no denying this unless you've preferred to keep your head in the sand.

Bullet is nothing if not psychologically extreme.  For the psychological perspective of just how extreme it is, read the post immediately following yours so you know how it affects those who play it.  The responses described by AIM-AceMove sound like signal reactions and not the symbolic, abstract part of the game at all. 

On the cultural side, most people are sycophants, even marionettes, of their culture and its perturbations, going right along with the times, thinking of them as absolutely normal.  They are unable to see the near clinical narcissism spread far and wide across the land, a deviancy of personality that requires self-oblivion to feel free, and the need for absolute aggression compressed in time.  Yes, Bullet is an expression of our times, and a very telling one.  To say otherwise in not just to deny how culture plays people like a fiddle, but to be ahistorical in your outlook as well.

I came to chess at the age of eight, in 1961, in a more thoughtful time, when my father taught me the game that he learned during his service to this country in W.W. II.  As I imply in my Amazon review of my first chess book, Edward Lasker's Chess for Fun and Chess for Blood, it was the beauty of the game that enchanted me and continues to hold a spell over me.  Bullet chess is anathema to beauty, a mistake ridden, ugly stepchild who prefers to throw his toys around rather then get out the erector set and build something unique that other people can enjoy.  Truth is, deviant chess is too good a name for it, it's anti-chess.

If you are older and remember a time before Bullet, before the trivialization of U.S. Championship tie-breaks with the execrable Armageddon, you will know what I mean.  On the other hand, if you are a millennial and received an education -- and an expensive one at that -- at one of today's not so free thinking universities, you will prepare your rebuttal by saying I'm too judgmental, I'm not inclusive, I don't understand because you do and all the rest of the PC rubbish that weighs the culture down.

Before you judge me as some pompous ass, some schmuck feathering his own nest, read what I wrote on my thread What is your favorite master or grandmaster game?  I asked players to post their favorite game; so far only a handful have.  Here's what I wrote in response:

"I consider chess more than a game, it is its own subculture.  More books have been written about chess than any other "game." However, chess extends beyond that subculture; with the florescence of various countries, chess has been part of that rise.  The best players in the 18th century were French, in the 19th century it was the British, Paul Morphy being the outlier, and America revealed its skill at the game in the first half of the 20th century before the rise of Russia; now China is becoming quite skilled at chess as played in The West.

My hope was that this thread would reveal what particular chess games mean to players who love chess as something more.  Unfortunately, it has not generated much interest, revealing that chess culture is not very deep here at chess.com.  It seems that for all too many players the games of the greats are there for one's self-improvement rather than works of art to be appreciated on their own terms, for their unique beauty or adamantine logic -- perhaps both.

Also, because I compare the great games to my piddling productions, I thought others might do the same.  In many ways I would rather play through the games of the masters than "create" my own, sort of like visiting a museum for Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Dali or Picasso rather than draw my own stick figures or dabble in finger painting."

You see, I'm the servant of this game not its master.  Can a Bullet player say the same?  Can you?

One minute should be enough....Of course it is for fun.

@ fightingbob:

I'm as much a critic of the environment on today's American college campuses as anyone else, but I really don't see what this whole "culture" thing has to do with bullet chess. As a cultural anthropologist (or an anthropology enthusiast?), you no doubt have a very unique and informed perspective on culture; however, I think this might be one of those cases where a practitioner of a profession or expert in a field is inclined to see his profession/field in everything. A lot of psychologists like to psychoanalyze everyone, and many literature theorists will manage to tie everything back to "ideology." (And opponents of free speech will characterize any speech they dislike as ... well, you know.) The same thing might be happening here. Some people think of chess as a culture, and some don't. Some like to play bullet chess, and some are strongly opposed to it. There really isn't all that much significance to these differences if you ask me.  

I'm not an "anthropology enthusiast;" I have studied cultural anthropology from my college days under John Greenway, who was in turn highly influenced by Alfred Kroeber's idea of cultural patterns and processes.

My view of culture is deterministic and superorganic, meaning it is beyond the individual organism to shape it significantly, though the dominant male usually has a good go at it.  In other words, changes initiated by the culture become part of historical trends.

I don't expect you to agree, and if I were you I wouldn't either had I the view of what currently calls itself cultural anthropology.  Tragically, over the last 40 years the discipline has been politicized, transforming itself from a knowledgeable and wise discipline into a mishmosh of cultural Marxist race, gender and class propaganda.  These men, and I do mean men, not adolescents produced by our culture today, would have none of it.

Do me a favor and read the reviews at Amazon of John Greenway's magnum opus: Down among the wild men: The narrative journal of fifteen years pursuing the Old Stone Age aborigines of Australia's western desert.  You might also look at this interesting review.  Hopefully it gives you a flavor of the real discipline and the men, now passed, once behind it.

Anyway, I still say that extremes -- or if you prefer, excesses -- that have burrowed their way into the culture are reflected in Bullet chess just as they are reflected in our sports, in our entertainment (particularly musical entertainment), in our politics, in our humongous deficit, and in our out of control government.  I suspect that historians will one day write about the age of excess.

I wondered the exact same thing when I first came to chess.com nd learned about time control. Now I play it to see how fast I can move my pieces before my opponent times out :D

Ugh!

some good insightful posts but I do wanna chime in..

bullet can be fun but also very addicting like others mentioned. I still play but rarely now, b/c I know that it is totally messing up my long game and if I want to get better, I know I need to at least cut down. 

to pass time, I will at least play 3/0 blitz. I disagree with the notion that 3/0 is pretty much the same as 1/0 bullet; someone mentioned that. with 3/0, you can at least have some time to think of some type of attack, albeit a superficial one whereas with bullet, if I play too many games, my head will start spinning and when it gets really bad, for a split second, I won't even know what color I am, lol.

the irony of the situation is that out of all time controls, my bullet rating is the highest. nothing to be proud about but when I'm on, for a beginner, I can flag a lot of opponents who are better than me and would crush me in 3/0 blitz. and boy oh boy the rage by some people in bullet is the highest due to ego, addiction etc. my 2 cents.

Hello Mr. Mathews:

I thought you felt the same when you added your favorite game to my original post.  You talked of beauty so I assumed you were upholding the integrity of this 1400 year old institution against the anti-chess antics of Bullet.  Apparently, your insults proved me wrong.

That said, at lease try to be a little more original next time.  I mean "pompous jerk," "long stupid posts" and "Bullet hater" aren't very interesting.  How about hyper-inflated windbag, or proposing the moniker, Bob the Bullet Bashing Bastiid, or coming up with an expression for my lost cause such as, Bob tries to put Lightning back in the bottle.  I just hope your game doesn't suffer from the same lack of originality.

I don't know about you, but I'm waiting for the day when the World Championship is 30 minutes a side, or even shorter at 15+5 like Greg Shahade wants to make it.  I'd lay money its going in that direction and the popularity and money to be made will push it along even faster, just as it did in pool.  Can I assume you'll be climbing aboard for the ride?  Won't that be fun, fun, fun?  Give my regards to Broadway.

Best,
Bob

I'm afraid you're wrong again, New Jersey James, it's "pompous ass" that has the long lineage, not "pompous jerk."  As far as "long stupid posts" having the "virtue of absolute precision," that would only be so if you put a comma between long and stupid, for the long modifies post not stupid.  Shame on you.  As far as originality not being a substitute for accuracy, what can I say; spoken like a true, unimaginative bureaucrat.

Bullet chess is awesome :)

Okay, it's a draw.  I may have played a computer programmer in real life, but I have never felt part of the Internet age despite being on this computer much too much.  I feel more comfortable with what Tom Brokow called The Greatest Generation, my parents' generation, but they are passing into the night and I was born too damned late.  So it goes. 

The last time I checked, it was.

They play to BRAG their lucky wins like this one:

Probably the most EPIC 1 minute game in the history..

Who taught you to play in such a wonderful way?

Please don't embarass yourself

A lot of bullet players spend much of their time playing slow, standard chess.

Bullet provides a fun, exciting change of pace.

It's also a great way to toy around with lines that you don't normally don't play. (For example, lately I play a lot of hypermodern in bullet, but in standard OTB, I play classical chess.)

Good times!

At least you have a sense of humor about it, Harish73.  I'm tempted to say, round and round she goes, and where the tactical mistakes (on both sides) stop nobody knows.  It seems that if you limit your tactical mistakes in Bullet you're the winner.  The same can be said of classical chess, but the glaring tactical errors occur far less frequently.

Unless you're a grandmaster familiar with many openings out to move 25 or so, I would say there is little strategy or subtle endgame technique, that is if it gets that far.  For most players it appears tit for tat until you lose a piece, and after that you either counterattack like crazy or just get out of the way and hope to survive the clock. 

From a practical point of view, I can see it as a means for improving very rapid board vision (versus visualization of future positions or "seeing ahead").  In other words, it's good for determining how you are progressing in Dan Heisman's definition of counting and his safety trilogy of checks, captures and threats.

I'm trying to give it a chance as a useful tool and not be a Bullet Bashing Bastiid.