Traps, Tricks & Mistakes: Bullet Influence
When we talk about Blitz and bullet games, we refer to chess variants with short time control. Usually less than 5 minutes per player. While time controls for blitz are between 3 and 5 minutes, for bullet chess are even shorter. There is a general assumption that the faster a time control is, the lower the quality of the game. Moreover, the result of about 30% of those games are timeouts. However, they are very popular among chess enthusiasts.
The reason for referring to those chess variants is because it has a link with the story behind today’s game.
Madrid (Spain) hosted the Candidates tournament in 2022. The pool consisted of eight players: Jan-Krzystof Duda (Poland), Ding Liren (China), Fabiano Caruana and Hikaru Nakamura (USA), Ian Nepomnichtchi (Russia), Teimur Radjabov (Azerbaijan), Alireza Firouzja (France) and Richard Rapport (Hungary). The format was a double round-robin with a prize pool of €500,000 (€48,000 for the winner).
It was a Candidates debut for Alireza Firouzja. And chess fans had high hopes for Alireza after Magnus Carlsen referring to him as the best representative of the new generation.
In round 11, Firouzja playing the white pieces, faced Ian Nepomniachtchi, who in the end became the winner of the tournament.
Below is a diagram of today’s game.
The tournament was a disaster for Firouzja. After 11 rounds he stayed at the bottom of the standings with only 4 points (+1=6-4)
After the game, Nepomniachtchi commented: “I didn’t really understand what was going on today from his side. I would say he played in a very optimistic manner. Every game here he plays for a win, but we know sometimes the way he plays is a little bit artificial.”
The early story of this game was that Firouzja was up all night playing hyper bullet chess (30 seconds per player) on the Internet. And most likely his play against Nepomniachtchi kept the same tendency of a fast pace and risky moves.
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