Getting thrashed in Bullet Chess by Good Karma!

Hello and Welcome to my blog.

How are you, my chess nerds? Chess is a beautiful game of sports. I have developed this habit of opening apps on my phone and playing a couple of games thinking I would just play one or two games of Blitz or Bullet Chess but it gets so hard to just leave it after two games. I play it for another hour, mostly going on a losing streak and still playing...lol

Since the last time I shared a chess post, I have played some more games and the highlight for this week has to be playing Bullet with @good-karma!

I got the message on Lichess after I shared my last chess blog on Hive. I couldn't believe it was Good Karma. His username was gkarma on Lichess and later he replied on Hive too.

Well, I challenged him to a correspondence game as he is quite busy. I will not talk about that game in which I forgot to play my move and lost...lol. Rather, I would talk about a Bullet session that we played a couple of days ago!

Analysing Bullet games doesn't make much sense. But I still went back and saw what went wrong. We played a total of 10 games and I only won 2 which is very bad for me even though I was slightly less rated. I knew what went wrong with most of these.

These bullet games were 1+0 (1 mins each with 0-second increments) and these require super quick reflexes. And a bit of warming up too. I didn't warm up enough and went straight to the Bullet games.

You can see I lost almost all of the games on time. But it is not an unusual sight in Bullet chess. The rating difference you see is just over 100 points and statistically speaking the stronger player is likely to win 65% of the time with that difference. Which is about 6.5 out of 10 but Good Karma's score was 8 out of 10 which means either he played way over his rating or I played way below mine (which I think is the case).

Let me show you a rare game where I was able to hold him off. This was the last game and I was playing better towards the end of the session. Game Link

You can see how slow I was at the start, look at this game. I lost this one on time while he had almost 30 seconds remaining! Game Link

I was getting bad positions out of openings with Black pieces and would get under time pressure along with horrible positions. It looked like hopeless to win with Black. Although, I was close in a couple of games.

Even though it was a good beating, I enjoyed it. That was a tough challenge and playing Bullet Chess is always exciting and thrilling. I hope @good-karma enjoyed it as much as I did and I wasn't a very weak opponent for him (the final score suggests it though...lol)

Position of the Day

White to Play and Win!

It was an equal position but Black's bishop decided to capture a pawn which looks like a free pawn. But this is a huge blunder which leads to a forced checkmate. Can you see the moves?

The forced sequence starts with Rb5+ and the next rook comes into the attack with Rxa4+. The only move after this second check is to just block it with Bishop which will be captured by the Rook on a file and sadly this one greedy pawn pickup leads to an unfortunate mate.

Blitz progress?

I did play a few Blitz games and it wasn't good. I lost some ratings but still over 1800 and close to my all-time high. The 2000 Blitz goal is still far though.

Let's just hope I can cross 2000 Blitz before the end of the year!

• All the content is mine unless otherwise stated.
• Screenshots and GIFs from Lichess.org and banners created in Canva.
• Text dividers from @cryptosharan.