How I Achieved 2000+ Lichess (bullet) in Under Two Years (as a child)

A reintroduction to Chess

I've been playing chess since I was 5, but only ever extremely casually and perhaps a game a week at my school's chess club. This interest slowly grew last year, where I started watching YouTubers like Hikaru & GothamChess, which inspired me to start playing online.

Three months ago, I discovered Chessable and began using their platform to study openings & train pattern recognition. In doing so, I stumbled upon a lovely community of chess enthusiasts on discord, and was immediately drawn back into the game.

As a result, I've decided to try document my thoughts once every two weeks or so, both about my own improvement and anything else I've found interesting in the game. @AdrianoNunesFX gave me the idea of discussing something about bullet (and why you should stop playing it) , so hence this blog post has appeared.

Why did I play bullet?

Bullet chess is an extremely addictive time control. You feel like each game only takes up two minutes, so surely it'd be beneficial to get in more games in less time, right? Or maybe you have an upcoming test or some stuff at work you're worried about, and you think bullet is a fast way to destress. Wrong.

Not once have I ever played a single game of bullet. It always starts with one - followed by another and another until I've lost 100 rating points or until I absolutely must step away and do something else. I found myself being pulled into these compulsion loops over and over again, the "new opponent" and "rematch" buttons pulsing with anticipation. This is a dangerous game to be playing - detrimental to both your chess improvement and your mental health. Raging and tilting are prevalent in other time controls, but bullet is what makes these emotions of anger and annoyance the worst. You don't want to be burning out and getting angry at something you're meant to be enjoying. Don't play bullet.

The slow first six months

The dangers of bullet are that it completely hinders the most crucial aspects of your chess development. The ability to quickly spot checkmates & chess patterns does improve - but you'll also get much better at those things doing tactics and playing slower game modes.

It's hard to improve just playing bullet. In my first six or so months, I slowly crawled from around 1600 to 1750 - a 150 point improvement, or an average of 25 points a month. Whilst this might not seem so bad, obviously, as a beginner, the initial improvement should've been the fastest. This was not the case. If you want to get better in any time mode (including bullet!), playing bullet is not the answer.

What changed?

As I stated in my introduction, chessable's been a great training tool for me. If you haven't heard of it yet, I highly encourage checking the site out. Since the day I started on chessable, I've used it consistently, working on my openings, tactics and endgames. The second book I purchased on there was a community-written (non-titled player) course called common chess patterns. My 300 point gain over the last three months was through the repeated drilling of these patterns & tactics - not from playing bullet.

Of course, it is entirely possible to just do puzzles on lichess (or a potential competitor site). Chessable had nothing to do with directly boosting my rating points - it wasn't some sort of "pay $30, get 100 points" scheme. I do plan on writing a blog post discussing the benefits of using chessable over other free resources & tactics, but I fully believe I could've seen the same improvement from just doing lichess puzzles, even if it might've taken a bit longer.

Furthermore, after some suggestions from people in the community, I started playing blitz & longer time controls instead of purely bullet. It is only in these longer time controls where you have adequate time to calculate and think about your moves. Intuition is built through thinking. It comes from slowly analyzing many different positions and calculating potential moves. Intuition is definitely the biggest factor in bullet chess - but it is also definitely not developed through playing bullet chess.

A wrap-up

My conclusion and advice to newer players wanting to improve.

1. Don't play bullet

As I've outlined thoroughly in my post, this only hindered my improvement. Although I believe bullet is a fun gamemode, if you want to improve quickly this is not the way to go. It's fine to play bullet occasionally - I still play sometimes. But don't get caught up in it so deep you don't do anything else.

2. Do play longer time controls and solve tactics.

Longer time controls are what help you build the calculation skills and positional understanding that is crucial to chess as a whole. Tactics will improve your intuition and pattern recognition (and yes, it will help your bullet skills). You can get away with breaking all kinds of chess concepts in fast time controls until you reach a reasonably high-sounding rating, then get stuck and plateau without knowing why. At some point, bullet chess does become more than just trying to flag each other.

3. Join a chess community of some sort for motivation and help.

I wasn't able to break free from endlessly playing bullet until @AdrianoNunesFX whom I mentioned earlier helped me realize I was restricting my own improvement. Checking his very impressive lichess profile, I decided I'd be an idiot if I didn't take up his advice. Joining a community on discord or anywhere else is critical for finding people to discuss chess and chess improvement with. The official Chessable server is definitely a good place to start if you want to find out more about their courses.

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I hope you've enjoyed reading my first, lengthy post. My future posts will be around spaced repetition & chessable as improvement strategies. By then, I hope you've considered easing on the bullet and have collected some nice rating points as a result.

Until next time, stay
SeriouslyChessed