Bullet Chess

L1m1tless

Anybody here play Bullet Chess i.e. 1 or 2 minute games?

Do you think it is bad for your overall chess game or does it help sharpen up your tactical awareness?

I play a lot of it and I have noticed an improvement in my classical games but it may just be coincidence!

Would be interested to hear your thoughts.

Lucena

I don’t play a lot of bullet, but what little I do play doesn’t do a lot for me. I can’t seem to play any more than two or three games without being worn to a frazzle from the stress.

The way I play it doesn’t benefit my game. I just try to develop normally, getting the pieces out, chuck a few pieces in the direction of my opponent’s king, and hopefully the attack will work out.

I don’t think it’s good for working on openings, for starters. If your opponent makes an error in the opening, unless it’s a huge mistake like giving away a piece, you won’t be able to take the time to exploit it properly. Also a lot of people play unusual openings that you rarely to never see OTB, in the hope of getting you out of book and making you waste a few seconds thinking.

Proper planning tends to take a back-seat as well. Instead of thinking “is there a weakness in the opponent’s position I can try to attack? ” it’s just hack, hack, hack.

Endgames? Never got that far.

Tactics? Possibly, but I’m not certain.

In fact, for me most games just seem to be about playing reasonable moves quickly and staying ahead of my opponent on time and hope that they lose on time before I do.

I don’t mean to be negative about bullet, if you enjoy it, keep doing it, but I doubt it will help improve your game.

Ciaran

CowboyDreams wrote: »

Anybody here play Bullet Chess i.e. 1 or 2 minute games?

Do you think it is bad for your overall chess game or does it help sharpen up your tactical awareness?

I play a lot of it and I have noticed an improvement in my classical games but it may just be coincidence!

Would be interested to hear your thoughts.

I'm terrible at bullet (I can't resist spending 15 seconds on one move at some stage) but I do play it occasionally. I don't think it really helps my game much but it might help intuition a bit I suppose. Losing on time in a better position is extremely frustrating though.

L1m1tless

I like to play 10-15 games with the same opponent,

They usually play the same opening, you can adjust and find the weakness over a few games,

I have never really studied an opening, I tend to calculate on the fly so maybe this helps me with Bullet. I have beaten some titled players at bullet, probably the only situation where it will ever happen!! :P

I guess it comes down to the concept of Time vs Material vs Position. There has to be a trade off somewhere and its a skill in itself to judge whats the best way forward in a split second.

Often the best move in Bullet may not be the best move in the same position in a regular game.

This is an amazing bullet game between 2 GM's if you guys haven't seen it before

cdeb

I kind of play online chess like it's bullet. I tend to throw out the first move I see, even though I know I have the time to study the position. That hasn't really helped much. In the last few weeks, I've started doing ten tactics a day on gameknot and actually spending 4/5 minutes over each position; I think that's had a definite impact on my game as I've spotted a couple of things much quicker at the board than I might have before.

But I'm a naturally slow player anyway.

L1m1tless

Ive tried some of those Tactical Puzzles on Chess.com. I just don't seam to have the patience to look at them long enough. If they were on a real board it would be different though.

I recently played a 2300 a series of 1 Minute games over the board. He was unbelievable. He even took the time during the games to tell me when I had made an inaccuracy!

cdeb

Just watched through that game; that's great fun! Though I did spot the Qh4+ move, which I'll attribute to my increased tactical awareness (I've not gotten quite as far as to analyse it out fully as a blunder )

I may rob that for our site!

I think Lucena made an apt (give his username) point in that bullet chess in particular doesn't help endgame training. At the risk of completely changing topic (we can split to a new one if necessary), anyone any good recommendations on how to practice endgames? There are some applets which allow you to play through the more basic endgames (knight and bishop mate; queen v rook, etc), which are useful but limited. Gameknot has some endgame positions in its tactics bank; I'd say only about 5% of the tactics are endgames, but they're excellent when they do come along. Has any site managed to isolate endgame tactics to allow you study those on their own? (Could relatively easily be done by including only puzzles with fewer than three pieces, or fewer than four pawns, or something like that)

cdeb

CowboyDreams wrote: »

Ive tried some of those Tactical Puzzles on Chess.com. I just don't seam to have the patience to look at them long enough. If they were on a real board it would be different though.

Patience is definitely an issue alright. Any more than ten at a time, and I find my concentration waning, and then your rating starts to plummet, which is no fun.

I find that it's best to try change your way of thinking about the position rather than looking for the best move. So I've tried looking for a focal point of the attack (from Vukovic) or for a move which threatens rather than a move which checks; that kind of stuff. I'm hoping practicing those kind of ideas will help me over the board.

Course, I still fall far too often for those desperado queen sacs to prevent mate, when I completely miss that the computer has just hung his queen!

L1m1tless

There's a good book if you have the time for it "Amateur to IM: Proven Ideas and Training Methods"

It covers mostly endgames with the idea that they are more important than openings to improve your game. Its helps you turn those draws into wins by knowing the technical endgame stuff.

I bought it myself 6 months ago but have only made it to about page 10.

Kingscrusher explains that Checks are only one type of forcing move and like you said we should be looking for threats which are also forcing moves. Its much easier to calculate a string of forcing moves than non-forcing moves.

cdeb

Might check it out alright. Though I struggle with chess books; I much prefer studying and making notes from DVDs. Have a couple of excellent ones I'm going through at the moment - two each from Karsten Muller's endgame series and Danny King's PowerPlay series.

L1m1tless

Oh nice. I really like Danny King. His commentaries on youtube are great.

I'm the same, I have bought so many chess books over the years and have barely touched them.

Ciaran

cdeb wrote: »

Has any site managed to isolate endgame tactics to allow you study those on their own? (Could relatively easily be done by including only puzzles with fewer than three pieces, or fewer than four pawns, or something like that)

chesstempo.com has an endgame setting, I think it runs off a tablebase so they're all 6 pieces or fewer, a lot of useful rook endgames though. You have to buy a membership to do more than 2 a day unfortunately.

Lucena

I use chesstempo.com with a full membership, and I find it very good for general tactics. I just don't find it very good for endgame problems, any time I tried to do them, there were just too many alternative moves (the site tells you you've made a move that's slightly worse than the best option, but lets you try again) in some positions such as King and Queen v King and Rook.

Some of these problems had at least five or six alternatives, so I didn't feel I was learning anything.

L1m1tless

Back to Bullet Chess, If anyone fancies a game on Chess.com let me know.