Liam Putnam: The Bullet Chess Grandmaster Known as LiamPutnam2008
Liam Putnam, who plays online as LiamPutnam2008, is a FIDE Grandmaster and one of the most relentless fast-chess competitors on the internet. While plenty of titled players treat speed chess as a sideline, Putnam treats it as the main event. His preferred time control is Bullet, and the numbers back up the obsession: thousands upon thousands of bullet games, a peak bullet rating of 3413, and a longest winning streak of 49 games in a row.
Ask him for a classical game and you may get a polite shrug. Ask him for a two-minute scramble and you will get a fight.
The Bullet Career of Liam Putnam
Putnam's bullet results read less like a hobby and more like an endurance sport. His overall bullet record stands at roughly 9,566 wins, 6,845 losses, and 1,126 draws, a workload that would exhaust most club players within a week. His blitz record is similarly enormous, with more than five thousand wins logged.
The trajectory has been steady rather than flashy. He climbed through the 2700s in 2020 and 2021, crossed into the 3000s during 2023, and kept pushing until the bullet rating peaked at 3413 in October 2025. That rating is a marker of genuine speed-chess mastery, not a lucky run.
3413 (2025-10-02)
Opening Repertoire: Scandinavian Defense, Nimzo-Larsen Attack, and a Taste for the Weird
Putnam's opening choices are unusual for a Grandmaster and that is exactly the point. Where many elite players grind out the same main lines, he loads up on offbeat systems that create immediate problems.
- Scandinavian Defense: his most reliable bullet weapon, scoring around 61 percent across more than a thousand games. He plays it with genuine conviction, not as a surprise weapon.
- Nimzo-Larsen Attack: 1.b3 appears constantly in his games, and it shows up in well over a thousand bullet outings with a win rate near 57 percent.
- Amar Gambit: over 1,200 bullet games and a 59 percent score, an opening most players would not even recognize across the board.
- Colle System setups: a staple of his bullet and daily play, used to reach familiar structures at high speed.
- Caro-Kann Defense: a dependable answer on both sides of the board, with solid scores in blitz and bullet alike.
His first-move statistics tell the same story. 1.e4 dominates, but 1.d4, 1.Nf3, and 1.b3 all appear in serious volume, which makes him unusually hard to prepare for in a format where nobody prepares anyway.
Here is a typical Scandinavian sequence from his bullet repertoire:
Playing Style: Endgames, Comebacks, and an Early Capture
What makes Putnam dangerous is not just speed, it is stamina inside the speed. Around 83 percent of his games reach an endgame, a remarkable figure for bullet, where most players either blitz out a tactic or collapse. Putnam grinds.
His average winning game lasts about 83 moves, and his average losing game about 89, which means he is not winning by cheap traps. He is winning by outlasting people. The first capture in his games typically lands around move six, so the position heats up early and then keeps boiling.
He also refuses to die quietly. His comeback rate sits at roughly 85 percent, and he wins about half of the games in which he loses a piece. Combine that with an early resignation rate of under one percent and you get an opponent who simply does not hand over the point.
Then there is the attacking record: across analyzed games he has delivered over 95,000 checks, more than his opponents managed, with rooks and queens doing most of the damage. When Putnam is first to give check, he wins around 60 percent of the time.
Rivals: The Danielnaroditsky Problem
Every speed-chess regular has a nemesis, and for Putnam it is clear. He has faced Daniel Naroditsky more than 2,200 times, by far his most frequent opponent, and that rivalry has not gone his way: 436 wins against 1,693 losses. It is the one matchup that reliably frustrates him.
Other recurring opponents have been far kinder. Against blackmind96 he holds a healthy plus score across more than 700 games, and shadowking71 has been on the wrong end of over 500 encounters. Long-running series like these are the quiet backbone of a bullet career: same opponents, same openings, endless small adjustments.
Habits, Timing, and Tilt
Putnam's results vary sharply with the clock and the calendar. Sunday is his strongest day at roughly 55.6 percent, with Wednesday close behind. His best hour is around 4 p.m., where he wins about 56.6 percent, while late-night and early-morning sessions drop into the low 40s.
His performance against higher-rated opposition is his clearest weakness: below his own level he wins about 66 percent, but against stronger players that collapses to under 30 percent. A tilt factor of 38 suggests that a bad run can carry into the next few games, which is the tax every bullet addict pays.
He finishes games decisively. Resignations and checkmates account for the vast majority of his results, with only a handful of timeouts and stalemates, and he has delivered checkmate himself dozens of times in analyzed play.
Why Liam Putnam Matters in Online Chess
Grandmasters usually chase norms and classical ratings. Liam Putnam built something different: a body of work in the fastest format the game allows, with a peak bullet rating above 3400, a 49-game winning streak, and a repertoire full of openings most professionals would never touch. He is proof that bullet is not a distraction from serious chess. For LiamPutnam2008, it is the serious chess.