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