I decided to create a Chess.com account to, you guessed it, play some chess. Specifically, I would like to play chess with people I know in person. While I now play online chess with some colleagues, I could not resist playing some rated bullet chess against anybody that would be up for it, and it turned out that it was not that difficult to reach an Elo rating of 2000. Here are a few observations on reaching 2000 Elo in bullet chess:
- I am not 2000 Elo great at chess. There is no way my rating should be even close to 2000, and this says more about bullet chess than my ability to play chess. Even people I know tell me that I am not 2K (I was at a dinner party the other day where a friend, when talking about my current rating, said that it made little to no sense as we have played against each other – and he was not impressed). The fact that I could reach 2000 is not the same as my average is 2000, and definitely not that my rating with another (or no) time control is 2000.
- 90% of the time is spent on the final 10% of the journey. It did not take me more than a few days to get close to 2000, but getting from 1900 to 2000 took a long time. Most of the time was spent playing against people at my level and – conditional upon who I was paired with – moving closer to or away from 1900. Here is an overview of my daily max Elo:
- Stick to a few subpar openings. Do not play 1.e4 as White (e.g., the Sicilian) or 2.e5 as Black. My reasoning is that it is better to have a less predictable response to popular openings that can gain a second or two in the beginning that can be converted into an equal midgame in terms of material with a slight time advantage. As White, I just give up center control from the get-go and play 1.g3 (to fianchetto the bishop and prepare for early castling). There are two things I like about this opening. First, you get your bishop on a good square that more often than not ends up winning you a rook because your opponent develops their queen’s bishop. Second, you can use this to put a lot of pressure on the center, and your opponent will need to spend valuable time thinking about how best to defend the space advantage. As Black, I like to play the Scandinavian as people often play 1.e4 as White (according to Chess.com, it is only Black’s seventh most popular response to 1.e4). This gets the queen out on the board early in the game, but it usually is an advantage as it can kill an extra second or two and you will eventually and hopefully make up for the lack of development within the first 10-15 seconds of your time. Again, these openings are subpar in classic games but fun and great choices in bullet. If I see an opponent making a similar opening with a lot of speed I might even try to give up a piece or two just to anticipate that the opponent will be too busy developing pieces and will not think about capturing until it is too late.
- Never ever resign. I have lost count on the number of games where I have won on time being down on material. There are many ways to win while you are still behind, especially if you are up on time, and even more ways not to lose. There is also something even more satisfactory than winning by sending the king on a journey through a double-digit number of premoves to turn a clearly losing position into a draw. And even if you are behind on time you can at least use it as an opportunity to practise setting up stalemates. The only exception to this rule is when you are down a lot of time with only your king left up against two rooks and you can see the premove pattern leading to a mate in X.
- Premoves work better on Chess.com than lichess.org. I have primarily played chess on lichess.org in the past (mostly because I like the product and its open-source nature). There is not really that much of a difference in terms of how you play, but the one important exception is the premove feature. Of course, the ability to premove is not something you encounter when you play OTB, and there are different ways you can implement such a feature. I do not know whether you can change the setting, but at lichess I could only queue one premove at a time, whereas on Chess.com you can premove multiple steps at a time, which is such a great feature. This has improved my game a lot. Also, I always auto-promote to a queen (no need for me to select whether I want a knight or a queen – in the unlikely case I want a knight, I just have to accept the problem).
- Bullet chess is the antithesis of classic chess. The irony is that I play bullet chess in order not to think. If I have a few minutes to kill but I don’t feel like engaging in any cognitively demanding task, bullet chess is perfect. Sure, it might require some thinking, but you do not really have time to think. So when I am playing bullet chess, it is not a replacement for classic chess but rather other games I play, such as Balatro (I might write another post about that game later). That being said, there are a lot of things to consider when playing bullet chess and I can only recommend it. If you are interested, do check out Bullet Chess: One Minute to Mate by Hikaru Nakamura.
- I can improve along two dimensions. Let us call them the spatial and temporal. The first is simply playing more classic chess, improving my openings, understanding of the game, positional advantages, etc. That is, taking a break from bullet chess and playing with more time, I will ideally become better at making good moves in bullet chess. In other words, there must be a limit to how much I can gain from primarily playing bullet chess. The second is how I play with time, and basically be better at making any moves. For example, I play with a touchpad on my MacBook, and I now and again make stupid mistakes that should not happen, and maybe playing with an actual mouse would help. I do not care too much about this, so I guess the focus – if I want to improve – will be on playing less bullet chess.