Tang Races To 6th Bullet Brawl Title Ahead Of Gurel, Martinez, Naroditsky

Two weeks after winning his first Bullet Brawl title in 2025, GM Andrew Tang triumphed in Saturday's event with a score of 227, scooping up the $400 first prize in the process. 16-year-old GM Ediz Gurel finished in second place on 218 points and was closely followed by GMs Jose Martinez and Daniel Naroditsky, who won $150 and $100 for their third- and fourth-place finishes, respectively.

The winner of the $100 top women's player prize was WGM Aleksandra Maltsevskaya, who was one of the few players able to topple Tang. In the community event, North Macedonian speedster "Macmasterr" took the title after a battle for ascendancy with multi-time victor Sundram Kumar.

The next edition of Bullet Brawl will commence on Saturday, February 15, at noon ET/18:00 CEST.

Standings

Saturday's tournament was a top-heavy affair, with GMs Sam Sevian and Nihal Sarin leading the way as the players with the highest FIDE classical ratings. However, the favorite was the 27-time winner Naroditsky, who played from Weissenhaus, the venue of the first leg of the 2025 Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour.

The field also featured several prodigies including GMs Gurel and Yagiz Erdogmus, the "Messi" of chess IM Faustino Oro, and FM Tanitoluwa Adewumi. Content creators like CM Volen Dyulgerov (also known as "Witty Alien") and WFM Lile Koridze also looked for opportunities to conquer some of the world's best bullet chess players.

Despite a meager 3/6 start for Tang, with losses at the hands of GMs Sevian, Oleksandr Bortnyk, and Erdogmus slowing him, the eventual winner positioned himself as one of the tournament frontrunners, owing to his ability to work his way through a high volume of games. 

While many of Tang's games against the top seeds were won in time scrambles, his ability to navigate worse positions pragmatically kept his title hopes alive. Against NM Jesse James, Tang survived a brilliant move and even allowed his opponent to promote a pawn before delivering a checkmate.

With Gurel and Martinez sticking with Tang for the first half of the arena, it took a Herculean 17-game streak to open up a 30-point gap at the top.

Tang's best games during this period were against GMs Bortnyk, Christopher Yoo, and Sevian— the latter was a 29-move, positional masterclass against the King's Gambit.

In the last quarter of the arena, Gurel tried to close the gap with 11- and 12-move wins, though these were in vain. The 11-move win over NM Francisco Muniz resembled a famous trap in the Sicilian Defense: Smith-Morra Gambit. 

Maltsevskaya, who won the best women's prize, did her bit to slow the progress of Tang, capping off a 74-move game by checkmating Tang with one second left on the clock. The Polish blitz dynamo finished the event with a Chess.com rating of 2857, six points shy of her all-time peak of 2863.

With a consistent string of online titles and over-the-board successes, Tang is one of the few players in the world who manages to compete among the world's elite all the while maintaining a corporate career (Tang is a quantitative trader for SIQ Susquehanna, a company that sponsors Chess.com's Collegiate Chess League). 

All-Time Leaderboard

Bullet Brawl is an exciting titled arena that features Chess.com's top bullet specialists and takes place weekly on Saturdays. The format is a two-hour arena with a 1+0 time control; the prize fund is $1,000.

Much like Titled Tuesday and Arena Kings, Bullet Brawl often features top GMs, including Hikaru Nakamura, Daniel Naroditsky, Andrew Tang, Tuan Minh Le, and many more!

Previous coverage:

• • Announcing Chess.com Community Bullet Brawl Tournaments
  • Introducing Bullet Brawls And New Arena Options