Fixing the mechanics of my bullet chess | Hacker News Reader

Fixing the mechanics of my bullet chess

jacobbrazeal.wordpress.com

40 pointstibbar35 comments

Touch screens (especially tablets) are also great for bullet because you can just tap-tap move, with as many fingers as you like!

Small unrelated nit: It's Elo rating instead of ELO, as Elo just stands for the surname of the rating system's creator, Arpad Elo.

It’s also a smaller area. I can tap the opposite corners of the board on my phone faster than I could click them on my computer.

Some chess snobs react with derision to using a mobile app to play… but I think they must be using the Chess.com app, which is awful - low response times, input lag, etc - and not the Lichess app which is snappy and reliable.

I must be very clumsy with my phone, because it takes me a painfully long time to make a move on my phone (i estimate it to be a bit under a second), while with a mouse I can click at the speed of thought.

It may also be age? I use mouse all my life, while touchscreens are relatively new.

Smaller nit: they were never Elo points to begin with because Lichess uses the Glicko-2 system.

I think at this point "elo" has become genericized to refer to any skill rating system

I think this depends highly on your mouse skills. Most of the top bullet players I've seen play on stream (Andrew Tang, Hikaru Nakamura, and Daniel Naroditsky) use drag-to-move.

A notable exception is Magnus Carlsen. He uses click-to-move, but I think his skill in bullet comes from his baseline chess skill and not his ability to move fast.

on computer, the difference between the 2 is negligible in my opinion, since either way you have to place the mouse at the start and then navigate to the finish with the only difference being if you are holding down left click or not.

on phone/tablet, the difference between the 2 is massive, since you don't have to slide your finger across the screen and can just tap tap (and even use multiple fingers if you want.

On a computer click click is a lot slower since you have to come to a complete pointer stop in your release. If your pointer is still moving in the release square most interfaces would detect that as some attempt to start a drag

On Lichess, this isn't the case; if I set my movement preference to 'click two squares', a click on a piece is registered immediately on mousedown regardless of cursor movement.

(When I set my movement preference to 'either', it's a bit harder to test, but I think a brief click-and-drag always counts as a click provided the mouseup happens within the initial square.)

The ability to physically move fast has relatively little role in bullet beyond a certain level, because most games will end on the board instead of in a frantic mouse scramble. This was even tested, to some degree, in one of chess.com speed chess championships. They had a bunch of top players including Alireza and Nakamura play one of the little reflex games where you have to click in a certain spot that lights up, and their performance was nothing noteworthy. Nakamura, the oldest player by far, was actually the fastest but his reflexes were again nothing spectacular, so it was more of a reflection of the reflexes of the other players.

>I’ve always been a good deal better (maybe a couple hundred ELO points) at blitz (3+0 or 5+0) than bullet (1+0).

I believe this is just due to how the ELO system works on sites like lichess and chess.com - you can also see the difference between blitz and rapid, and rapid and classic, and it's the case for EVERY player.

I'm not sure if this is true anymore. Some years ago chess.com increased bullet ratings by 150 points to better align them with blitz ratings [0].

[0]https://www.chess.com/news/view/10-minute-chess-now-rapid-ra...

> it's the case for EVERY player

No it isn’t. My bullet rating is higher than my blitz rating and I’ve got 5,000+ games on each.

I usually play chess with just my mousepad, so I've basically always just dragged and dropped. Playing click and click feels about the same speed, but I'm less used to it; maybe I'll try use it more in the future. I think Andrew Tang does drag and drop, and he's the fastest I've ever seen; I don't know if people like Danya or Hikaru do drag and drop, might be interesting to get some kind of statistical analysis of that.

>I’ve always been a good deal better (maybe a couple hundred ELO points) at blitz (3+0 or 5+0) than bullet (1+0).

I've basically always found that my bullet rating is at least 100 rating points higher than my blitz on lichess; possibly because I've wasted too much of my youth on bullet

Wow! I play rapid, but I love that trick as I like to premove, but this is a better strategy than premove in many cases. Thanks!

Does anyone else find that ELO skill built on screens does not carry over to over-the-board chess as much? It seems curious how physicality seems to materially affect a game which is meant to be primarily mental.

Elo is dependent upon the player pool. Claude Bloodegood [1] took this to an extreme, nearly becoming the highest rated player in the world at the time, largely by playing officially rated games in prison against other players who were completely inexperienced but whose rating did not reflect that since they were, in turn, also only playing against completely inexperienced players.

Online ratings have a correlation with otb ratings, but they're very different - especially on the lower (and extremely high) ends.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Bloodgood

I've been doing this for most of my games too. I find I'm less likely to release a piece somewhere I don't want with this method.

I think speed is important only for ratings in the lower end.

APM but for chess, outstanding.

This doesn’t make any sense. Click and click is slower than click+drag, it’s just obviously two extra movements (a full extra press and an extra release).

You can also drag and hover while waiting for the opponent move and release if the expected move shows up or right click to cancel the drag if not the expected move.

Also dragging and hovering over your target square is super useful to visualize your move and catch any last millisecond mistakes.

I do t think any of the top bullet/hyperbullet players does click and click. I think I have seen Magnus doing click and click in very old chess24 blitz videos but I’m not sure he did that in lichess playing bullet orin chesscom scc for example.

I never use a mouse, which probably makes a difference here: it's all via touchpad.

Not having the right click to cancel a drag would certainly be a huge difference

That seems massively relevant and should be in your post, assuming you're the author. Dragging on a touchpad is a nightmare for me: I would click and click with a touchpad, but would much prefer a mouse where I drag and drop. Click and click on a phone works great too.

(I'm playing at a significantly higher level than you, but nowhere near the elite players).

> Click and click is slower than click+drag, it’s just obviously two extra movements (a full extra press and an extra release).

From a pure physics standpoint, maybe, but humans aren't ideal physics actuators. Your muscles' ability to fire, your nerves' ability to fire, and your brain's ability to drive those (and also recover from each action) affects the dynamics.

In particular, your ability to precisely release heavily obstructs your hypothesis. There's a reason that sharpshooting guns still fire on trigger pull and not on trigger release.

Imagine a game where you need to precisely hit many targets quickly, and you can either click on a target or release a click on a target. You will be much more precise and quick only clicking even though you're doing "extra movements" releasing between each.

> Click and click is slower than click+drag, it’s just obviously two extra movements (a full extra press and an extra release).

I don't think this is right, because the second release is irrelevant (a click-click move happens on the second mousedown, not the second mouseup) and the first release can be done in parallel with the mouse movement. So really it is:

mousedown -> drag -> mouseup

vs.

mousedown -> (mouseup while moving) -> mousedown

mouseup has to occur before moving, or it initiates a drag

Not on Lichess. (I'm not sure about other platforms.)

With the click-to-move setting, the piece is activated on mousedown, and dragging is ignored.

Oh I see, I forgot there was a setting. I thought it was always either behaviour, depending on what you do.

I don't know for everyone but I think I can move a mouse faster and more accurately when not holding down the mouse button.

I only use chess tools that allow for vim bindings. /s

Not quite vim bindings, but lichess supports typing pgn for moves (at least for blindfold)

lichess.org is a treasure and as a friendly reminder https://lichess.org/patron#:~:text=No%2C%20because%20Lichess...

At some point there was "the keyboard extension" which was somewhat vim like (kinda). It was too overpowered and you literally could not flag someone who was using it in ultra or hyperbullet, so lichess finally banned it: https://lichess.org/page/play-extensions. Vim bindings were too overpowered for chess :D

I wonder what the metrics would look like when tested on a tablet device, i.e. no mouse, just finger-drag?

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