Well, the truth is than GM and good chess players win anyway, so its not that lottery ChunkyMonkey.
And yes, I agree its fun but its kinda mad. Computer skills more than chess skills.
Not always, and time is one half of chess. It never used to be that way. How many of us grew up learning chess with a clock? It used to be a game where a player would give up the game if it they couldn't contest it.....Now, .......
Club / Tournament games have had clocks for as long as there were organizations governing them. It used to be simple time controls like 2 hours for the entire game, etc. Even today if you watch any major tournament the classical time controls are generally some amount of time for the first 40 moves, then some amount of time with an increment to follow (and sometimes a third control after move 60).
This is internet chess, however, and for as long as internet chess has existed so have shortened time controls. People who came to the internet to play their chess usually did so to "fool around" with blitz controls or see how many games they could win in an hour or see if they could finish a match during a coffee break. No one wanted to play without a clock because of the fear that the opponent would just abandon the game for hours and hope you'd just disconnect. Some places like FICS allowed adjournment of games, and other places went the correspondence approach. But for the most part, games all around the internet were played at some sort of rapid time control for "standard" chess and some sort of shortened blitz control (5 minutes or less) for "blitz" play.
As engines started becoming better and better, and as a new generation of chess players who were born and raised on computer chess, video games, etc. came into the mix, the demand for even shorter and shorter controls came about. It's a need for speed, a desire to show off those twitch skills. Is it good for chess? Not for long games. Good bullet players, while generally they will still have a higher classical rating if they play both, will generally under perform. I can't count the number of games I've won under classical time controls where the opponent just doesn't stop and look at the position long enough, and thereby misses something truly game-changing.
All that said, if it's fun, it's fun. No harm in playing stuff for fun. It's just humorous (and sad) when people argue that bullet is somehow improving their overall chess ability.
Bullet chess does not raise chess skills other than possibly time pressure situations.
What have I done?!?
When I started playing here I maintained a bullet rating of ~1500 and tactics rating of ~1850.
After a while my bullet rating got to ~1700 (only 1+0 games).
And now with the 1/2+0 time control my bullet rating went up to ~1850.
Today I tried the tactics trainer and I can barely maintain a 1600 rating.
I still spend a similar amount of time on the tactics puzzles.
This is ridiculous. Enough is enough. No more bullet or blitz for a month.
I have found paddleball to the best training for speed chess. In the Olden Days they didn't even have clocks to speed things up so they had to rely on "sitting" skills. Why, La Bourdonnais was so slow, Mc Donnell had time to get engaged and finance a house before he would make his move in a difficult position. Adolf Andersson was so frustrated by his opponents' tardiness, he would stay at home and send his moves in German by semaphore. Fischer (always on the cutting edge) modified this by using long distance telephone to relay his moves to Cuba in the famous Capablanca Memorial Tournament in 1965. Later, he complained his bill was astronomical, the booth confining and that Petrosian, who was quite deaf, kept hanging up. But i digress.