Breaking Through 2300 Bullet on Lichess

Photo by ᴊᴀᴄʜʏᴍ ᴍɪᴄʜᴀʟ on Unsplash

I just broke through the 2300 rating level on Lichess bullet format and I'm just so glad that after all this time of playing and trying to reach the place where I could only dream of, I am finally able to step on that whole new level in which players are on a different caliber. Of course, it's not like there's going to be any difference than when I was playing in the 2000s or below, except for the fact that I'll be going up against really strong players, perhaps even those who are playing chess for a living. But I will not be fazed. I've had a very bumpy ride getting here and I feel like it won't be any different in that sense because there will definitely be times when I will fall below 2300 as well. This is only the start after all. But I hope to learn more as the days go by.

I will just show the game which helped me get to 2300. But before I show it, there's just one thing that I have noticed going up the ladder. It's that, the higher you go, the more difficult it is to get points because what you need to do is beat stronger players to earn more rating points and even then, if you're only going up against players who are 50 or 100 rating points higher than you, the most that you might get off of them would be like 10 points. You need to beat someone who is at least 150 or 200 points higher than you in order to gain more than that.

So that's why I think it will be super difficult to go from 2300 to 2400 and so on and so forth because you will continuously have to go up against much stronger players than you who have more experience, knowledge, and technique. And you will just feel like it's impossible and give up. Now, the good thing is that I'm playing this casually so I don't really feel too disheartened when I'm unable to get to that level since I know in reality that I'm not in that level yet. At least, from my standpoint, when you look at my actual chess ability especially in playing longer time controls, I'm still lacking. But I'll just keep going because I want to someday get at least a Master title in the game.

That was a long segue but now let's look at the game.

For the past several months, I've mostly just been playing a Reti-ish opening with Nf3, fianchettoing the bishop, and then castling. And it's worked well for me so far and that's what I went with here. However, that doesn't mean that I can't play other openings. It just feels the most flexible for me and I'm just comfortable with it. The reason for this is that I am trying to imitate Magnus Carlsen's style in a way, in that he doesn't really go for technically superior openings, rather he just plays whatever he feels most comfortable with in the opening and then grinding the middle and endgame. Of course, Magnus is on a whole other level and he can afford to do that because he has memorized literally thousands upon thousands of chess games that he can simply pull out a game from his mind and he knows exactly how to play the position. His technique is also more or less flawless, not making too many mistakes and, in doing so, putting pressure on his opponents. Anyway, that's why I chose the Reti. But technically, I've also studied a bit of the Queen's Gambit openings as well as the usual e4 openings, except the Ruy Lopez because it's too technical and complicated for me.

Looking at my game, everything until move 12 is what I usually play in these positions. As I said, it retains some form of flexibility and doesn't give away too many holes or weaknesses that my opponent could poke at. In this case, Black's plan is to open up the kingside by playing f5, putting his knight on h5, and trying to pry White's king position. Sometimes, he even plays his rook to the h-file in preparation for pushing the kingside pawns. Whereas White needs to do something in the center as a counterattack. I've been on the receiving end of some very deadly attacks in this position so one must always be careful and be wary of the proper timing and order of moves. Otherwise, you will find yourself being swept away in a barrage of attacks.

I tried something sort of different with this game. I played my knight on f3 back to g1 and then to e2 because I had wanted to push f4 before Black could ever play f5. And I was able to do that since my opponent, instead of going on the attack on the kingside, he played on the queenside. That gave me time to organize the move I had wanted to do and I played f4. From there, we both didn't actually play very accurate moves which is okay since it's bullet but it's always the one who makes the last mistake who will suffer the most so even though there were a few points when I was at a clear disadvantage, I was able to pull back up because my opponent made a worse mistake than I did. Everything was decided when he blundered a piece and I won handily.

I just wanted to share this because it's not too often that you get to pass a certain level and it gives you a little bit of excitement and giddiness when you do it. Of course, it can also get nerve-wracking from that point on because trying to maintain your current level will take a lot of painstaking hard work and effort which only the professionals would probably have the energy and the time to do.