Ten Things You Must Have to Play Bullet Chess Well

It has been well over a dozen years since the meteoric rise in the popularity of one minute ("Bullet") chess over the internet, and I think that at this point it is time to recognize it as more than a simple fad. It is, in fact, a mind bogglingly complex fad. With that in mind, I've decided to write a quick introduction into what you need to be a moderately successful bullet chess player. Bear in mind, however, that I hover around 2200 or so on most of the internet chess servers, so I'm hardly an all conquering cyber-juggernaut myself.

First: A Good Mouse

I suppose this one goes without saying, except that it's amazing how quickly we can get used to a crappy mouse and forget the difference.

Second: A Thick Skin

Playing bullet chess on the internet is probably the lowest one can stoop in our present society and yet still have to pay taxes. It therefore comes as little surprise that you will face a lot of less than pleasantly mannered opponents. That, coupled with the fact the game is inherently Hobbsian - nasty, brutish, and short - creates a recipe for discord and strife. The best way to handle all this is simple: swear loudly and vociferously every time you lose. It's therapeutic.

Third: Will to Win

Sadly, this one is probably the most important one of all. Why sadly? Because nobody in their right mind should care much about the result of a one minute chess game. But, rest assured, people do, and you must if you wish to win consistently. So, be prepared to enter a totally unhealthy mental state for the duration of your bullet fest - much like those old arcade games (Defender, Bezerk, Robotron, etc.) that pushed your reflexes and concentration to a totally unnaturally heightened state of alarm and anxiety.

Fourth: A Solid Yet Shallow Opening Repertoire

Openings are indeed crucial in bullet chess, for obvious reasons, but there are some misconceptions about what constitutes a "good" opening in this medium. In regular chess, one probably wants a detailed appreciation of the inner nuances of superficially similar opening setups. Er, or something like that. I wouldn't know, actually. Anyhow, this is totally useless in bullet, as those sorts of details will go by the wayside in ninety-nine out of a hundred bullet games. What you need instead is a reliable opening tableaux that you can fall back upon regardless of what comes at you, but not so predictable that someone can simply "Rock" your "Paper", as it were, by noticing you on auto-pilot and acting accordingly. An example of this would be when Black, vs an emerging Closed Sicilian by White, decides to just go h5-h4-h3 or a very quick b5-b4.

In other words, you want an opening that allows you to anticipate your next move under most circumstances, but you never want to completely ignore the other player, at least not until under five seconds or so. With this in mind, here are some common and decent bullet opening choices:

• Kings Indian Attacks/Defenses
• Colle Systems
• Caro Kanns as Black/English Openings as White

and so forth. Basically, the main deal with these systems is that the central pawns form fairly obvious and static structures, so you don't really have to think about them too much and can concentrate on other things. That said, it should be pointed out that picking a really chaotic opening can be fun too, but remember that your opponent, if sensible, is likely to react by just putting his pieces in manageable places whilst yours are all over the map and thus harder to mentally group together.

Fifth: Rhythm

Ideally, bullet chess involves a certain elusive mental rhythm, where ideas are flowing smoothly and naturally. Of course, most bullet chess experiences are not like this. They instead involve an opening that emerges like a jet skier in a whirlpool, a middle game with a lot of random pawn pushing and knight forking, and then a just total chicken with head cut off endgame. So, how can we avoid this? The answer is paradoxical. See if you can come up with it before reading below.

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The Answer:

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THINK. Yes. The one thing you're NEVER to do in a bullet game. But that's the secret - there's one moment in a bullet game where you need to take a quick but deep breath, and calmly try and improvise some sort of game plan or just general idea/conception about the present position. This thought can take anywhere from a few seconds to, really, at most a dozen or so, but it needs to happen, and one should accept this and not panic about it. The more one panics about this moment of thought the harder it will be to actually think during it, and thus the longer the think will likely need to be to be at all useful. That said, much of the art of bullet chess is determining WHEN this thought will occur. Generally speaking, it usually occurs after the opening has been stumbled through and one needs to regain some sort of general bearing. However, sometimes it happens earlier or later. Your intuition will eventually help you find when best to do this think, and for how long, but never expect that you can simply breeze through a bullet game with COMPLETE thoughtlessness, at least not against an even marginally aware opponent.

OK, throughout this rant you might have forgotten that the actual fifth thing I mentioned was rhythm. But that's the point I want to stress the most: if you think for a moment, you can flow afterward. So the rhythm of a bullet game is sort of flow, think, flow, or maybe flow, think, flow, think, flow, if you have two thinks in you. Also, there's mini-thinks as well, which are times you aren't anticipating your next move and obliquely think for like a second at most as a result. Those also help create the sort of frenzied iambic pentameter of a bullet chess game. Get used to this rhythm and strive to maintain it regardless of the chaos around you.

Sixth: Knights

Bullet chess is often about knights. Bishops take care of themselves, rooks just sit around until something opens up for them, and queens usually perch on some square like c2 or e2, eying possible weaknesses like an osprey on the prowl, but knights need to create their own opportunities. Also, the knight's move is an almost impossible pattern for even the most experienced players to anticipate, so they are absolutely brutal in the last ten seconds of a game. Try to keep them around, but bear in mind something important about knights - they are annoying to your opponents, but they are also mentally higher maintenance than a bishop or rook, which can often be developed somewhere simple and then almost forgot about like some sort of chessic appliance. With this in mind, I recommend this exercise: take a random diagram from any game with knights still on the board, and see how quickly you can imagine a path for them to a useful square. Do this until you just see the path as one big crooked vector of chivalry, as it were. Then check to make sure your new health plan covers psychoanalysis.

A video demonstrating the power of the Knight Fork in bullet chess



Seventh: The Last Ten Seconds

When less than ten seconds, one tends to abandon all strategic concerns and instead just try and create a situation where one can shuffle pieces quickly without too much opposing molestation. This is, generally speaking, an excellent plan when facing really bad players. When facing even halfway good players, however, it is highly iffy to purely shuffle because all it takes is about two seconds to rush a pawn down the board, auto-queen it, and then with that queen all chance of any sort of smoothly out shuffling your opponent is practically gone - there's too many possible checks to anticipate. Or, even more likely, checkmates. Therefore, the best plan for these ten seconds is have a plan for the previous ten, and that plan should be twofold:

• Keep Playing Chess
• SEIZE THE INITIATIVE AT ANY COST

The latter part of this plan really cannot be stressed enough. To illustrate it in an extreme form, here's a video of two 2 0 bullet games where White seems hopelessly behind on time, but manages to actually win both games in mutual zeitnot due to his initiative. (In the first game it should be noted that, were not for the hanging of White's queen with five seconds left, the finish would have likely been much less close).



Eight: Empty Threats

You've probably heard the chess maxim "the threat is stronger than the execution", but in bullet that maxim can be basically multiplied by several million orders of magnitude. The thing is, in chess there's a surprisingly large amount of "threats" that, especially in bullet, don't actually mean as much as they seem to. Among the most common of these are overextended pawn pushes, knight forks that "win" an exchange but lose the initiative, checks, and other moves that your opponent must constantly bear in mind until you actually play them. These "threats", after having been played, often prove worthless, but in the last ten seconds of a game they are worth their weight in gold because you can rattle them off instantly instead of running around like an unfortunate extra in a disaster movie. Also, and just as importantly, they provide extra mental ballast for your opponent, as part of his/her mind must be occupied by the dangling possibilities your murky feints entail. Well, unless your opponent just ignores everything you're doing, that is, which is a special (if common) case: for such an opponent the main thing is to identify their style as soon as possible. Once you realize your opponent isn't paying any attention to your moves, you can take advantage of that in lots of fun and amusing ways.

Nine: A Second Queen

When you have a simple winning endgame (as in extra pieces, lots of extra pawns, or both), sometimes by the time you queen your first pawn you're down to a frighteningly small amount of time. Often the simplest way to handle this is to just queen another pawn instead of trying to effect a mate with "just" one queen. First off, queening an unstoppably passed pawn from the second rank usually takes less time than one might realize - I've seen people do it (usually against me) in less than a quarter of a second. Second, and most importantly, most of us lag a little, and while you're making instantaneous moves that lag adds up during the queening process and affords you time to peripherally assess the position and how best to checkmate with the extra queen you're about to have. Of course, generally speaking, the best way with two queens is to just check (thus avoiding stalemate) until mate happens - but it's worthwhile to note that this strategy is also exactly the WRONG way to mate with one queen.

Ten: Food.