Hikaru Nakamura offered a candid assessment of Magnus Carlsen's Bullet capabilities, drawing a distinction between variants with and without time increment. According to Nakamura, Carlsen performs comparably to other top players when increment is added to Bullet games. However, in pure Bullet without increment, Nakamura contends that Carlsen does not maintain that same level of performance.

Carlsen currently sits eighth on Chess.com's Bullet leaderboard with a rating of 3344 points, placing him 49 points behind Nakamura. Despite this assessment of pure Bullet play, Carlsen recently demonstrated his prowess in faster time controls by winning the Speed Chess Championship in February. In that tournament's final, Carlsen defeated Alireza Firouzja four times while drawing twice and losing three times.

Nakamura's own showing in the Speed Chess Championship proved less successful. He finished in fourth place after suffering a loss to Denis Lazavik in the lower bracket final.