Milestone: 1200 on Lichess Bullet

In the early days of taking up chess as a substitute hobby for philately, my venue of play was exclusively Chess.com and my format of play was exclusively 10-minute Rapid. Later, I installed the Lichess app on my phone and established a modus operandi such that at home I played on the computer with my Chess.com account while outside I played on the phone with my Lichess account. Bullet chess seemed at this time beyond my skill level, but I did dabble in Blitz games on the Lichess app, particularly when on the toilet at work. Lichess was a training ground. My rating there wasn't important. The only rating that mattered was my Rapid rating on Chess.com.

On Lichess, Bullet is divided into two types: "1+0" and "2+1," i.e. "one minute plus no extra time" and "two minutes plus one second per move." The former is still too challenging for me to engage in meaningfully, but the latter has grown on me to the point where I not only enjoy and learn from the games but have also begun caring about my rating. To be clear, "caring" is a relative term. My Rapid rating on Chess.com continues to be what matters most, since Rapid best reflects the amateur player's overall skill level under persistent time pressure and Chess.com is where most amateurs play. Then comes my Rapid rating on Lichess, then Blitz, and then Bullet.

It was apparently at the end of May that I played my first Bullet game, the first in a long string of losses. On June 24th I bottomed out at 1073 and thereafter started settling into a groove and winning games consistently. In July my rating stabilized in the high 1100s; and on July 6th, while exploring Sweden's High Coast region, I won a game that put me above 1190 for the first time. Finally, on July 11th, while sitting in the Stockholm Public Library -- appropriately with a stack of chess books that a librarian had fetched for me -- I crossed 1200. As of writing this, my rating sits at an all-time high of 1221.

The rules of Bullet chess are no different from Rapid and Blitz, but Bullet demands some rewiring of the brain's chess pathways. Since reaction time is crucial, instinct and the ability to make second-to-second decisions are as important as tactical awareness and strategic acumen. More so than in formats of chess with more generous time controls, the goal isn't so much to checkmate the opponent as it is to fluster him and slow down his reaction time. Paradoxically, it is common for a player in a winning position to lose on account of spending too much time planning a checkmate combination while the losing player, whose only concern is the defense of his king, can react faster and win the game on time.

11 July 2022

The game that elevated me above 1200 is not instructive in specifically this regard, although time pressure did play a role. Assigned the white pieces, I opened with the Queen's Gambit. Black declined with 2...e6, and I initiated an early exchange of pawns on move 3. The crucial position in the game was reached on move 13: I captured Black's pawn on b7 with my queen, in the process forking his rook and knight. Black thought for close to half a minute, found no better reply than 13...Qd8, and thereafter stumbled with a series of blunders and allowed me to checkmate him on move 23.

Pins, forks and discovered attacks are key offensive weapons in chess. They take time to plan and are therefore harder to execute in Bullet than in other time formats. Although the fork in this game was more of an accident than a planned maneuver, it may be the case that I am getting better at putting myself in positions where these weapons manifest themseves with greater frequency in my game. Concomitantly, there seems to be an improvement in my avoidance of falling victim to these weapons in my opponents' games.