Slower than a speeding bullet

Until recently I hadn't ever really played bullet chess. Every once in a great while I'd give it a try and it made no sense to me. This wasn't chess as far as I was concerned, it was just an exercise in who could move faster. I was terrible at it, of course. I'd play a game or two, lose, and wouldn't play bullet again for months. I wasn't particularly upset about it, because I didn't think it proved anything about chess other than that I didn't move my pieces like lightning.

I started playing bullet more a few weeks ago because I didn't have enough time for a proper slow game. I could have played blitz, but it was a sort of personal challenge to see if I could condition myself to play a reasonable game of one-minute chess.

I knew going in that I was going to be very bad at it. Until I played quite a few games I had no idea how bad. I was so bad that I started to become amused by the extent of my ineptitude. I couldn't move fast enough. When I made bad moves I lost. When I made good moves I lost. No matter how awful my opponents were, they never moved slower than me, and I lost on time in pretty much every game I played. Often my opponents made better moves than me, but it didn't really matter whether they did or not. In fact I played a number of games like this one:

My opponent would just give his pieces away, so I would take them. In the time it took me to do that, my clock expired and I lost. I learned that I was able to make about 20 or 25 sort-of-reasonable moves in one minute in most games (my record number of moves in a one-minute game is 32), and if I was able to checkmate my opponent in that number of moves then I would win; if I couldn't, I lost. I rarely could.

Running out of time in a clearly winning position is called being "dirty flagged." Being dirty flagged is common in bullet chess and it happens to me all the time. What I couldn't figure out is why it never seemed to happen to my opponents. I started to think that maybe in bullet chess the key was to not worry about the quality of my moves at all, and just move, move, move, as long as I was doing it fast. I tried that in a couple of games, and it resulted in me being up on the clock after about 15 moves but having no pieces left. Even bad opponents had no trouble cleaning up when I had no material to defend myself with, and I continued to lose. I couldn't just move fast; I had to make some not-terrible moves too.

I couldn't seem to do both. I lost, and I lost, and I lost some more. During one stretch I lost 23 games in a row. And I was not just screwing around; I was genuinely trying to win. It didn't seem to matter what I did. I either blundered material and/or checkmate, or I ran out of time. Every time. My opponents never did. It was uncanny. I lost a game on time in a won position when my opponent had 0.01 seconds left on his clock.

My apparent inability to win a one-minute game against any opponent was half infuriating and half amusing. Of course I would win the odd game here or there; a weak opponent would occasionally stumble into a checkmate before I reached my 25 move limit, or they would blunder their queen early and resign, not realizing that if they had kept playing they would almost certainly have won on time. Even more rarely I would actually win on time, but only when I was easily winning on the board; if I've ever dirty flagged an opponent I sure don't remember it. So I did win occasionally, but not very often and this makes sense--my bullet rating on Lichess as of this writing is 808, which is the 3.2 percentile, so 96.8% of the players on Lichess are better than me.

Eventually as my bullet rating dropped to somewhere around its current level, I was paired up more often with players even worse than I am, which at one time seemed impossible as I didn't think such players existed. Now finally it's becoming more common for my opponents to flag or to miss mate in one, and I think my rating is stabilizing and I'm winning nearly as often as I'm losing.

I still don't think bullet chess is comparable to slow chess even though it's only the time control that's different. It's like a variant; if you're good at one, you're likely good at the other. To be good at bullet chess you have to see simple tactics incredibly fast (well, I think it's incredibly fast anyway), and that's a huge advantage when playing slow chess as well, so you can use your time making plans and doing deep calculation rather than using 30 seconds every move making sure you know what pieces are threatened like I do. In a way it reinforces something I said in another recent blog entry about my own chess ability, which is that it takes me a long time to notice obvious features of a chess position (sometimes when playing bullet I hesitate because I can hear the sound indicating my opponent has moved, but I can't figure out what piece he moved), but despite that handicap I've been able to (usually) play a competent game at slow time controls because I take my time and am very careful. I try to be proud of that, but it means I'm unlikely to ever get any better than I am now.