Why playing Bullet won’t help you achieve all your chess goals
Bullet chess is one of the most popular time controls on Lichess. Although it might be very fun to blitz out moves, racing against the clock to beat your opponent, it won’t help you as much as it seems in the long run, and here’s why.3rd most played time control on Lichess
This shows the amount of games between humans in the lichess database.
This shows the amount of Bullet games. There’s also around ~370,000 bullet players per week alongside rapid with ~420,000, blitz with ~720,000, and all others under 100,000. This makes bullet the 3rd most played time control on Lichess.
So, what’s the problem?
This is probably what you’re thinking right now. Why does it matter that ~30% of all games are bullet? Now, I’m not saying that playing bullet is particularly bad. I even play it a bit myself, and have lots of fun while being terrible at it (as my bio suggests). But just playing it isn’t the problem. It’s playing too much of it.
Bullet chess is usually played in the 1+0 format. This means that each player starts with 1 minute on their clock, and you do not regain time when you make a move. So unlike most time controls, not much time is spent thinking.
The problem with not spending much time thinking is that you can’t go over your games. You probably know what to do in the situations you are in, but the time pressure overpowers the thinking. You can’t spend too much time thinking about the move, or you might flag! This makes it incredibly difficult to learn from your mistakes. Until you play a real game where you have enough time to think, you won’t know your weaknesses. And without knowing your weaknesses, you can’t know your strengths.
Learning from your mistakes
At a certain point, you will have instincts to not hang your queen under time pressure. Except the only way you can get those instincts is by practicing.
Overtime you will learn lots of tactics and strategies, and eventually master them. Once you have mastered them, they will become instincts and will improve your chess (apart from the Botez Gambit).
You may find that you learn these things playing Bullet, and if you do, that’s fine. Except for me, and for I think the majority of people, it will help to start with a slower time control and maybe a little bit of bullet on the side.
Another problem with playing bullet is that if it overpowers the slower time controls, you will get used to playing that fast and won’t spend as much time as you can or need to thinking.
One of my chess teachers would tell students “You don’t get extra points for ending the game with 10 minutes extra left on your clock.“ It was a rapid tournament, and he was right. That student actually did a lot better playing slower, although he still played too fast most of the time.
Conclusion
I may not have convinced you to change anything about how much of what chess you play, but that’s okay. This post wasn’t meant to stop you from playing bullet, but to make you aware. You may not agree with much in this post, except I hope it might stop you from playing those few extra bullet games on your hunt to reach a milestone, and instead play a rapid game to make you proud of that last game, no matter if you win or lose.
