Quote:
Originally Posted by Superfraggle
I think rapid and longer time controls are better if you're trying to learn and get better at chess in general, because it gives you time to think about what you're doing and why.
Blitz is good fun, but the quality on both sides goes way down because of time pressure. Like TheIronMaiden said, learning your opening lines will be huge, because you can get 5-10-15 moves into a game without needing to take time to think. It definitely lends itself to wilder, trickier tactics and attacks, because people don't have time to calculate and find the right move.
I'm way worse at blitz because I haven't figured out the balance to time management yet. Recognizing when to play a safe move quickly even if it isn't the most accurate vs. spending precious time working out a tactic or double-checking for blunders is a whole new skillset in short time.
If you're playing more passively, rather than going for a big attack, I think it's important to keep track if any of your pieces aren't directly defended or if one piece is defending two things. Where in a longer game you might move a piece to a safe square, knowing you will need to move it if it gets attacked, that's easy to forget when you're making moves quickly on a different part of the board.
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I couldn’t agree more. Blitz is fun and addictive, and from what I understand (I haven’t actually tried it…) bullet chess is like meth for nerds. But playing at faster controls doesn’t help you improve nearly as much, and for me I found that playing more blitz actually made me a worse player at rapid time controls, because I got into a rhythm of thinking and calculating less.
That’s probably just me—one of my main flaws as a player is sometimes getting into an analytical single - track and then lacking the patience to calculate lines all the way to the end. When I was playing lots of blitz I kind of forgot what a huge problem that can be when your opponent has more time.