Ruben Mantel: A "Rapid Interview" with Germany's fastest blitz player

12/29/2020 – In rapid, blitz or bullet the players have between one minute and one hour to mate or flag their opponents. In Hyperbullet they have only 30 seconds. But why not speed this up a bit? How about Ultrabullet, where each player has only 15 seconds for the entire game? "That's silly and has nothing to do with chess anymore", some might say. Ruben Mantel, Germany's best Ultrabullet player, partly agrees with this statement, but not entirely. In a "Rapid Interview" he talks about the attraction of very fast chess, how he came to like Ultrabullet, and whether this form of blitz destroys the game of chess or might help to improve it.