Experienced bullet players will likely spend less than a minute on this chapter, but that’s the whole idea of bullet chess, isn’t it?
What is “bullet chess”?
In this book, we use the term “bullet chess” interchangeably with the more awkward term “one-minute chess.” At the Internet Chess Club, however, “bullet” is used to describe any game with less than three minutes per player, while “blitz” is used for games with between three minutes and 15 minutes per player.
Isn’t one minute fast?
Yes, it is.
Is bullet still chess?
Of course not!
This is the fundamental truth about bullet chess that many players fail to understand. Bullet is certainly a form of chess, and much of what you’ve learned about chess applies to bullet, but bullet should never be confused with conventional chess itself!
When non-bullet players scoff “it’s not chess!” the correct response from a bullet player is “who said it was?”
Then why play bullet?
Because it’s fun!
Why aren’t there any books on bullet chess?
Bullet chess is a fairly recent development, so it’s not surprising that no one has written a book on it. In any case, in-depth analysis of one-minute games seems like an absurdity, and what else can you do in a chess book?
But if you can’t analyze the games, what can you write about?
First of all, absurd or not, we do analyze bullet games in this book, although we hope we are not too critical. Bullet is hard to play, and even harder to play well. Apart from analyzing the positions on the chess board, we also try to explain how bullet differs from normal chess and how understanding these differences can improve your bullet play.
It is important to realize that bullet chess is not really about “truth,” to the extent that some chess players use the term to refer to the objectively best moves, but rather whatever works. Bullet chess won’t often help you in your search for “chess truth,” although it will certainly help you learn how to play chess more quickly! But bullet chess will teach you a lot about chess psychology, as there is always a reason that any particular move is played. It may not be a good reason, and it may not have much to do with the actual position, but there is always a reason. In this book, we explore the reasons why players do what they do when they are short of time, especially when it comes to making mistakes.
While we will often discuss moves and variations in the pages to follow, it will always be with an eye to the clock, because that’s what bullet chess is all about.
A few ground rules
In the rest of this book, “bullet chess” will often be referred to simply as “bullet.”
For both complete games and game fragments, we have identified the players only by rating. One of the attractions of internet bullet is anonymity, and we have protected our sources. It isn’t giving away much, however, to reveal that where one player’s rating is over 2800, it is one of the authors.
All games in this book were bullet games, with each player having one minute for the entire game. The games were played at the Internet Chess Club (www.chessclub.com).
Any critical comments in our annotations are purely for instructional purposes.