Bullet Chess: One Minute to Mate

by Hikaru Nakamura

Chess in the Fast Lane! Can anyone play a decent game of chess in one minute? Surprisingly, the answer is "Yes" as this unique book reveals. "Bullet" chess, where each player has one minute for the entire game, has attracted thousands of followers since it was popularized on the internet a decade ago. In this book the authors discuss the relationship between the position on the board and time on the clock, the techniques and dangers of "pre-moving," bullet openings, the importance of the initiative and consistent strategy, and how endings are different in bullet chess. The authors also explore the psychology of bullet chess and the most common causes of tactical oversights and blunders. The many examples illustrate the principles of bullet chess and how they may even apply to blitz chess and time scrambles in standard chess. Most of all, bullet chess is shown to be entertaining and addictive, and not at all as random as it first appears.

Genres: Chess, Games

249 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Manny · Rating 4 out of 5]

To see the World in a Grain of Sand
Or Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand
And Eternity in a Game of Bullet Chess

This is a flawed but remarkably interesting piece of work - one of the most original chess books I have ever read. Hikaru Nakamura, currently World #7 and the undisputed king of Bullet Chess, opens up and tells you what it's all about. Can you really play a game of chess when each player only has a single minute to make all his moves? And is it a worthwhile thing to do? The answers, I am now convinced, are yes and yes. By compressing the schedule to this apparently insane point, the player is forced to confront fundamental truths he might otherwise prefer to ignore. And by the way, forgive me for using the masculine pronoun - for some reason, the game seems to be heavily male-dominated.

But going back to those fundamental truths. Chess players like to imagine that they can play perfectly if they only take the time to think carefully about their moves, and that the game is about truth and logic. This is absolutely not true, and Bullet Chess reveals the lie in all its absurdity. Chess, like life, is about using a finite amount of time to best advantage. The positions where you can find the one best move are the exceptions. More often, you should trust your experience and judgement and make a move which, as far as you can tell, is okay. If you overthink, you won't necessarily play a better move than the one you first came up with. It's entirely possible that you'll play a worse one, and you'll be wasting precious time that you might have been able to spend doing something genuinely useful at a later stage of the game. Nakamura gives instructive examples of bad time management. As he says: in Bullet, thinking for ten seconds when the position doesn't demand it is at least as bad as dropping a piece.

I have read few books that convey as effectively as this one how every second counts, every moment is precious. It's an odd path to enlightenment, but then all paths to enlightenment are odd. Nakamura Sensei, I bow before you.

Now, if only the editor had spent more than one minute on his mundane but important task...
________________________________________

Update for people who are serious about speed chess: this book has tangibly improved my play, in particular in the all-important field of time management. I strongly recommend it. You may think you manage your time well, but you can almost certainly do better. And if you want to see hard evidence, look at my ICC rating graph for the last year. For the three months before I read the book I was averaging under 2250, but the average since then is over 2350. I have trouble believing it myself.


________________________________________

Not and I are doing live web commentary this week at the Geneva Masters tournament (you can see us here if you're curious). Nakamura is playing, and we have already commentated on six of his games.

At speed chess, he is simply phenomenal. He never seems to need any time to think. Today, he was playing Alexandra Kosteniuk, a former Women's World Champion and a reasonably strong grandmaster. He completely destroyed her in both games, just using a few minutes of the 25 he had available. Kosteniuk used nearly all her allotted time to achieve two miserable positions, both of which she lost quickly.

You really wonder how he does it.

[Junta · Rating 3 out of 5]

As someone who has played over 10,000 games of bullet chess (chess where each side just has one minute to play all of their moves) online, predominantly in my teens, this book was a nice trip down memory lane, covering the form of chess where speed is just as important as skill, tactical traps trump positional pussyfooting, and you are reminded that in the end, we all play chess because it is fun.





1 December, 2018

[notgettingenough · Rating 4 out of 5]

We are commenting on an international chess tournament, it is all very exciting....and I figured I had to wheel out my Naka review, since he is in the tourney.

http://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpres...

[Edward Kuruliouk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Turns out that bullet chess analysis is less educational but more fun than regular chess analysis. I enjoyed the game break downs and the style in which the book is written, but this is far from any sort of mandatory reading for chess players. I would recommend this one to chess players interested in bullet but only as a fun exploration of the format and not as an educational tool.

[Aniket · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the ONLY bullet chess book I could find and it did not disappoint. I've been playing bullet chess a lot recently but found myself stuck at around 1400. Even though I didn't improve too fast while I was reading this book, it did give me confidence and the right mindset to accept your blunders and move on. As of right now, I'm at 1700 and I hope to be a 2000 at bullet by the end of this year. Would definitely recommend to fans of bullet chess!

One minor criticism I have is of the chess board illustrations. The board theme and the piece set used in the book is a bit difficult to follow.

[HD · Rating 4 out of 5]

It reminds me the reason why I started playing chess in the first place, because it was fun. The book fetched the memory of having tons of fun engaging in psychologically strenuous war in which I'm pitting my wits against an opponent from the back of my head.

Complex strategies that include vicious attacks and subtle defenses take me beyond the thrill of competition and into the realms of the creative process, of art. All in a game under 3 minutes called bullet chess.

[Siddharth Shankar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book on speed chess techniques and skills. I still remember one rule in bullet which echoes throughout the book "In bullet a bad move is better than no move at all". This one is as entertaining and exciting as Nakamura's Twitch streams, though playing yourself is always needed to get the fun. Play bullet chess for fun rather than taking it seriously.

[Morris Nelms · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chess books are not "read" in the traditional sense. You study them. This one is great. Plenty of stuff to discover.

[LILA LILA · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good book. It really helps. I recommend it.

[Amar Pai · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kind of a rip off-- it only features one or two of Nakamura's games! And a lot of the book consists of analysis of bullet (1 min) games, which is somewhat inane. Still some food for thought here, at the very least it does a good job of defending bullet chess as a concept (detractors: "it's not real chess" proponents: "who said it was?") and it has some good general advice on how to manage time, handle weird bullet openings, etc.

PS if you play bullet on chess.com or ICC or whatevs, make sure to enable pre-moving, it's hugely important