Nihal Sarin's 15-Game Bullet Streak

Nihal did not arrive in the Grand Final as the favourite. He reached it by first beating GM Andrew Tang and GM Arjun Erigaisi in the losers' bracket, results that would headline most bullet events on their own, before ever facing Firouzja. That path matters: he arrived at the biggest match of the event already having beaten two elite bullet specialists back to back.

Because Firouzja had not yet lost a match, Nihal needed to beat him twice running to win the title outright, a Grand Final and, since he came from the losers' side, a Grand Final Reset. He won both, 15.5-7.5 and then 9.5-4.5, a streak of 15 straight games without a loss stretching across the two matches. Beating the same elite opponent twice in a row, rather than once on a lucky day, is the harder version of this result to pull off.

At bullet speed, a single opening misstep or a moment of hesitation compounds fast, once a player finds a rhythm against a specific opponent's habits, reading their move choices half a second faster each time, the gap widens quickly and rarely self-corrects mid-match. That is the mechanism behind a 15-game streak: not 15 separate brilliancies, but one player finding a tempo and pattern-recognition edge that held for two consecutive matches.

That this was Nihal's first-ever Grand Final appearance in this event makes the result more notable, not less, a debut run that ends in dethroning a three-time champion is a rarer outcome than a gradual, expected rise to the top.