Fixing the mechanics of my bullet chess

I’ve been playing chess a long time now, and 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). Well, I may have just fixed that. I changed how I move pieces this afternoon and have gained about 100 ELO already. When I play on a computer, I usually drag-and-drop pieces. But it turns out you can also move pieces by clicking first on your piece and then the target square. An analysis of my recent games indicates this shift saved me about 0.25 seconds per move, shifting from an average of around 1.8 seconds/move to 1.6 seconds/move. I can’t believe I never figured this out before.

The graph above compares a 25-game rolling average of my ELO vs. average seconds per move over the last 100 games. Ithink there are a couple things going on:

• click-and-click ™ is physically faster than drag-and-drop, especially when the piece is moving a long way.
• click-and-click allows a better alternative to pre-moving, which matters a lot in bullet chess. You can click the piece you think you’ll move before your opponent moves, and then if the move still works, you can instantly click the target square. But if the move actually doesn’t work, then you can avoid the blunder.

It feels like I have just enough time to actually think through my moves now. Historically I’m usually so short on time in bullet chess that I end up pre-moving a lot of the game, or otherwise rushing, with all the associated blunders. This change in mechanics has cut the difference between my blitz and bullet ELOs in half, and I think if I keep playing, the difference will continue to drop.

Has everyone else been doing click-and-click this whole time instead of drag-and-drop? Sheesh!