Reading from main memory is faster than reading from disk/STDIN.

BufferedReader uses a technique called buffering that allows us to reduce how often we read from disk/STDIN by copying chunks to main memory.

Consider:

BufferedReader in = new InputStreamReader(System.in);
in.read(); // 
in.read(); //
// ...
in.read(); // could be hitting the disk/STDIN a lot (slow!)

vs:

BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in));
in.read(); //
in.read(); //
// ...
in.read(); // hitting main memory a lot (fast!)

From the documentation:

Without buffering, each invocation of read() could cause bytes to be read from [disk/STDIN], converted into characters, and then returned, which can be very inefficient.