It’s almost a different game. Yes, thinking “fast” is good, but it’s not about finding an ideal move, it’s about finding any move that isn’t an obvious blunder as quickly as possible.
There’s also different strategies that emerge with the time limit. Running out the clock of course. When time gets low just move quickly. Also, confusing moves. Anything that makes your opponent go “Wait, what?” can give you an advantage in time.
- Detect when your opponent is using premoves and use that against them (for example, if you think an opponent probably has a premove for their next turn, you can plop an unprotected bishop right next to their queen. If you guessed wrong, you lose the bishop. If you guessed right, you take their queen.)
- In an endgame with seconds left, you can make “confusing” moves that in any other game would be blunders: Say a rook-pawn endgame, if I notice my opponent has a second or two left I’ll plop my rook right next to their king. Check, the premove is invalidated, they scramble to move their king and run out of time.
So much meta-gaming potential in Bullet.
It’s also the variant where internet latency starts to matter a lot. When you’re making a move per second, or better, the difference between 100ms round trip ping and 30ms starts to add up.
Edit: according to this page lichess does compensate network lag to make play fair for players on slower connections, though it doesn't specify how. https://lichess.org/lag
Blitz and bullet chess are much more fun because precise play is impractical and conservative strategies don't work as well. You can drag a wild, tactical game out of the most timid opponent.
For the vast majority of players, this simply isn't true. Even for the top players in the world, it's only sometimes true when they are playing with the black pieces, or a win doesn't do anything for their standing in the tournament.
Aggressive play puts a chess player at a marked disadvantage. So people don't do that. They play conservatively, because that gets them the best results.
The intent may ostensibly be to win, but the observable behaviors are driven by loss aversion.
Again, the vast majority of players are not strong enough to even know any lines, let alone refute the endless variations that may be thrown at them. Unstable positions typically end in a blunder, or a simplification down to an end game. No matter how risk averse one of the players is, the other player usually has the power to change the nature of the game pretty easily. And at non-classical time controls (rapid, blitz, bullet, etc...) the game becomes extremely interesting at all levels of play.
I’d argue that faster speed relies more on pattern recognition and intuition, versus strategy.