AN UNEXPECTED OFFER, OR GRANDMASTERS ARE MACHINES — AND MACHINES CAN BREAK

“You should write a book.”

Me? A strange thought. It caught me somewhere between surprise and the most natural thing in the world. In the end, for a man who traveled the road from being crushed so thoroughly by his father that surviving fifteen moves was considered a victory, to a player who was defeating grandmasters in miniatures and holding a positive score against some of the legendary names of the game, it seemed almost inevitable. The story itself is nearly cinematic. And the 178 days and 22 hours of life I left on Lichess somehow obligated me to do it as well.
The story of how a self-taught guy, without any special chess talent or expensive coaches, without any formal learning process, managed through sheer fanaticism to enter the top 0.7% of bullet players and the top 0.8% of blitz players is certainly worth telling. As inspiration for other amateurs, but also as proof that such a thing is possible. After all, I defeated some of the greatest and most prolific authors in the history of the game, so why shouldn’t I write a book myself?

It will be interesting to see the board through the eyes of an amateur—in every sense of the word.

Still, I did not want to turn this into merely a personal story. Classical chess today is dying a slow and boring drawish death. Capablanca, as a prophet of the coming demise of this knightly game, announced it with the insight of a genius, unaware of the programs and databases yet to come. Later, Fischer correctly concluded from personal experience that chess was becoming a dreadful game of memory, stripped of the human creativity that had adorned the golden age of Morphy and Anderssen, Steinitz and Lasker, Capablanca and Alekhine, Tal and Petrosian, Karpov and Kasparov.
Now it is cyborg chess, where two grandmasters (and there are still only about 2,000 grandmasters on the entire planet!) exchange memorized engine lines until reaching an often inevitable and uninspiring draw. Everything has been overanalyzed and thus sterilized. Like a football derby ending 0–0—or perhaps even worse.
Hence the frustration of the immortal Magnus Carlsen, the strongest player of all time, who has publicly expressed his dissatisfaction and increasingly devoted his free time to much shorter formats. If, as a passionate lover of the game, I would rather watch a blitz battle between two anonymous FIDE Masters than a World Championship match in classical chess, that probably says something about the deepest crisis standard chess has faced since the game's creation. Simply put, it is too slow for the pace of modern life.

Instead of Capablanca Chess (which added new pieces in hopes of revitalizing the game) or Fischer Random Chess (which eliminates opening theory by shuffling the starting positions), masters are turning toward something else: simply reducing the length of the game. At one minute or three minutes, chess becomes a completely different game than it is over four hours. Theory can be challenged. Positional understanding becomes dominated by tactical genius. Human intelligence once again becomes the heart of chess.

Dogma falls into the mud of practical proof.

Complications become the essence of the battle of human wills and imaginations, and even the very best cannot escape the sword in short time controls. Chess once again becomes a game of creativity and life rather than an endless agony, as boring as watching paint dry. It becomes a duel, a dance, even a form of lovemaking—not an endless and somewhat meaningless code formula generated by a faceless bot.

I never accepted the technocratization of chess. Five hours of sitting through tournament rounds for ten or fifteen days held no appeal for me. I’m not sure why a hobbyist would willingly embrace such masochism. That kind of chess is suitable only for professionals; for people with jobs and responsibilities, it becomes exhausting the moment they enter university.

Instead, I chose shorter time controls: rapid (up to fifteen minutes), blitz (up to five minutes), and especially bullet (up to one minute), where human creativity, geometric intuition, mathematics, and poetry still have a chance.
It was within that space-time framework that my ultra-sharp style evolved—a style I jokingly called “bear chess.”

“A bear only needs to hit you once with its paw,” I would say with a laugh.

I dove into complications not with fear and uncertainty, but with open desire and absolute faith that my tactical eye would prevail even against the strongest opponents. I would create chaos, Nezhmetdinov-style, caring little for the objective evaluation of the position, and often found myself in Tal’s deep dark forest, where the bear either struck or was struck. But such a style produced memorable victories and triumphs of the human over the machine, of the amateur over the grandmaster. It was the victory of an idea over matter.

Marshal Rokossovsky admitted that the Wehrmacht was a machine, but he also understood that machines can break. Building my own chess doctrine on that maxim, the conclusion became crystal clear:

Grandmasters are machines—and machines can break.

So I accepted the challenge of writing.

Following Capablanca and his Fundamentals of Chess—the first chess book I ever read, a book that changed my life and deeply impressed me—I will structure the work in two parts.

The first part will be a bullet chess manual by an amateur for anti-grandmaster chess, where we will explore the dominant concepts of this legendary form of the game through practical examples and theoretical classification of its elements.

It will answer the question:

“How do I even play chess with so little time on the clock—and win?”

It will be extremely practical and pragmatic, and therefore, I hope, useful.

The second part will be a collection of twenty annotated bullet games and ten blitz games, mostly against grandmasters, demonstrating in practice the ideas and concepts introduced in the first section.

I intend to write in a light style without heavy engine annotation, because my entire chess existence is, in some sense, a rebellion against that kind of chess. Recently I received a 250-page Najdorf manual consisting entirely of engine lines—not a single word of explanation. While relatively useful, it is far too sterile even for grandmasters, let alone for someone who wants to enjoy the game.

I also plan to include personal stories that may be interesting even to people who have never sat at a chessboard, but perhaps one day will. Maybe even because of this book, which is the product of a fifteen-year fascination.

Readers will not find perfect play in its pages, because the book does not pretend to offer that.

But they will find grandmasters bleeding in the mud of complications.

And when grandmasters bleed, it is proof that they are not gods, and that there is still hope for the little man—the amateur.

And that chess, at least in its shorter forms, is still alive.
That it has not yet become a cruel silicon dystopia.

On June 11, 2026, BocoPacer began writing, after selecting the games.