Bullet Brawl Dec. 6, 2025: Nakamura Proves His ‘Old Hands’ Are Still Quick Enough For Bullet Brawl

GM Hikaru Nakamura is now one title away from securing a landmark 50 Bullet Brawl wins after he won December’s first arena while joking about his relative age to the rest of the field. Nakamura scored 53.5/63 for a total score of 180 and barely put a foot wrong from start to finish. 

Second-place GM Oleksandr Bortnyk finished 30 points behind Nakamura, while GM Sina Movahed ended a further 15 points behind. IM Renato Terry rounded out the top four, and WFM Veronika Shubenkova was the highest-scoring women’s player. The prize winners will receive $400, $250, $150, $100, and $100, respectively, for their efforts.

The next edition of Bullet Brawl will commence on Saturday, Dec. 13, at 12 p.m. ET/18:00 CET.

Standings

(Full final standings here.)

Three months after his last Bullet Brawl victory, Nakamura returned to Chess.com’s quickest titled arena with a spring in his stride and broke the dry spell with a comprehensive performance in front of a live audience on Kick.

The now-49-time winner kicked off proceedings with a 14-game streak, which featured wins over GMs Bortnyk, Sanan Sjugirov, Jeffery Xiong, Andrew Tang, and Haowen Xue. Like most of Nakamura’s GM opponents, Xiong put up stiff resistance but was punished by Nakamura’s patience. A crushing blow on move 30 prompted Xiong’s resignation.

Several games later, Xue met the same fate as Xiong after playing 40 moves with just two inaccuracies. Under serious time pressure, the Chinese GM blundered a crucial pawn with 41.Bf2?? and resigned immediately.

Game Review revealed a CAPS [Computer Aggregated Precision Score] score of 93.1, which wasn’t enough to keep up with Nakamura’s lofty 97.5 score.

The player who caused the most problems for Nakamura was the 14-time winner and hyperbullet champion Tang. Despite the head-to-head score favoring Nakamura, Tang used a lethal cocktail of speed and accuracy to defeat the leader on two occasions. 

In the first of his wins, Tang held his nerve after Nakamura missed checkmate-in-two moves, and eventually converted a king and two pawns vs. king and one pawn ending with fewer than five seconds on the clock.

Although Tang proved to be a thorn in the side of Nakamura, his 23 losses meant that he had to settle for 10th place.

For GM Ediz Gurel, who won the two previous editions, it was a tough week. Four losses to Nakamura all but dashed his chances of a hat trick, and he eventually finished in sixth place with 41 wins, five draws, and 20 losses.

After defeating Gurel at the back end of the tournament, Nakamura had one sentence to sum up his performance in the game and overall: “These old hands still have more speed than some of these kids at times.”