Analysis Board is making me worse?

I play slow and sit on my hands alot when I think I've found my move because I know if I rush into it I'll see the blunder as soon as I submit.  I find better moves than my initial choice all the time as a result, but still manage to make more than my share of blunders.

I don't use the analysis board for this very reason.  You can do well on chess.com but not improve your game, or you could lose your games here but learn from them.

I chose the latter; what about you?  The choice is in your hands! 

Well, I enjoy looking through different variations and such, which is obviously not possible in OTB play. I think it makes the online experience more enjoyable. I don't think it harms my real-life play too much, because I go to a club weekly, allowing me to keep my chess-awareness sharp! (Well, as sharp as it needs to be for a ~110-120 ECF player.)

Grobe and Nytik, you have to look at this more deeply. Sure, you can't use the analysis board in a real game but that doesn't mean other parts of your game can't be improved. It allows for deep calculation and shows you what they look like and it also shows how you can play out particular plans (I do this all the time and it helps my strategy). You can't do it in a real game and therefore can't play as well as you do correspondence, but still other parts of your game improved and you should still improve on your otb rating you just can't expect it to be as high as your correspondence skill. OTB chess should definitley be practiced and don't rely on the analysis board but use it as a tool to deeply analyse the position. Eventually you will be able to calculate the patterns you see on the analysis board in your head, and this can help you see more without it. Correspondence, like blitz (but I always prefer correspondence because of the richness of games) improve certain areas of your game. Just don't rely on any of them too much but use them to help your game and see new things.

Elubas, I think you mean Grobe and G-Money, I said that I DID use the analysis board on occasion, when I feel like I can spare the effort.

Well I only read your post #19 when I thought you were saying that it's a fact that the analysis board makes you worse. Only after I posted, I saw your other ones. And yeah G-Money is making huge exaggerations. In fact for me it's just a matter of getting all the deep ideas that I do in correspondence (which makes me over 2100 there but class B OTB) into tournaments which is not easy but can gradually happen. The point is, you learn a lot of ideas with the analysis board, even though you can never play at as high as your online because of course you don't get the other benefits. But that does not mean you can't get better with it at all and dead wrong to say it makes you worse. Unless, like some people maybe, they only rely on it and expect to be able to do it in a tournament game!

I personally use the analysis board fairly often, but I see it in the same way as I see how using a calculator all the time affects my ability to do math in my head... I think it makes my brain lazy. I'm so accustomed to pulling out a calculator whenever I need to do math, that when I'm in a situation where I have to add numbers in my head it's almost painful. Since I've been using the analysis board, it's become much more difficult for me to see more than a few moves ahead without it...

CC chess trains skills so you learn different things but don't calculate. But if you wanted to do everything in your head, then just play OTB. CC (with analysis board) will increase your undertstanding of chess and show you some long variations you have never seen before. You will need to calculate on your own in OTB, but that doesn't mean this kind of chess makes you worse. It sure doesn't make me worse at calculating in my head and I do analysis training and plenty of live games to balance things out. Other types of time like blitz can also help, but not nearly as much and it's more like a variant in many ways because you will never use all of your knowledge only condensed versions of it, and I'm not very good at that and always want to blunder check well each move. At least with CC you increase your knowledge of positions, now you just have to realize that in a tournament you can't use the analysis board. But it hasn't really made me worse, because I still calculate on my own every other way of studying the game and I'm still being introduced to (sometimes very deep) tactical ideas even if I'm not calculating. I still have to pick the best move on the board. It's far from a computer and so some people will never see certain things even with an analysis board.