Nakamura's 66th Bullet Brawl Win Extends an Absurd Streak

Hikaru Nakamura won Bullet Brawl for a record 66th time on Saturday, September 12, and the margin made the result feel almost routine for him and staggering for everyone else.

Nakamura finished with 184 points. IM Yoseph Theolifus Taher took second, but he finished 42 points behind, a gap that in a bullet arena event is less a close race than a lap of the field.

None of this is new territory for Nakamura. Bullet Brawl has essentially become his personal leaderboard, and a 66th title puts him in a category of dominance that most players in any format never approach once, let alone dozens of times over.

What makes the streak worth pausing on is how it compares to the last time this exact thing happened. Just one Bullet Brawl earlier, Nakamura picked up his 65th career title, a result The Chess Herald framed as the latest chapter in a two-decade run at the top of online bullet chess. Sixty-six is simply the next chapter, arriving with barely a pause between installments.

That kind of week-over-week consistency is the real story here, more than any single 184-point outing. Bullet chess punishes lapses in calculation and clock management brutally, since a single blunder or a few seconds lost can flip a game instantly. To rack up win after win in that format for years, rather than catching one hot week, points to something closer to a structural advantage than a streak.

It also raises the obvious historical question: what does a rival even look like at this point? Second place going forward 42 points isn’t a nail-biter finish, it’s a gap that suggests the players chasing Nakamura in these arenas are competing for silver almost by design.

Taher’s runner-up finish this time is still a strong result in its own right, but it lands in a tournament where first place has effectively been reserved for years.

There’s a useful parallel in how other online arena formats have developed their own recurring dominant figures. The Chess Herald has covered similar dynamics in Renato Terry’s bullet arena dominance, a pattern explicitly described as echoing the Nakamura era in Titled Tuesday.

The comparison matters because it shows this isn’t a one-off phenomenon unique to one player or one event. Online bullet arenas, with their high game counts and heavy reliance on pattern recognition and speed, seem to reward a certain kind of specialist so consistently that a handful of names end up owning entire event histories.

For Nakamura specifically, the number 66 is really just a placeholder. Given the pace at which these titles have accumulated, there’s little reason to think it stays the record for long. The more interesting number, going forward, might not be his win count at all, but how close anyone else can eventually get to closing that 42-point gap.