Hi, I'm just starting to get into playing faster blitz games (3-5 mins). I was just wondering what you guys do to train for blitz games, and what resources are out there. Can I find guides specifically tailored to blitz (suggesting aggressive openings, with wild attacks and traps, etc)? What books do you suggest, etc?

I've played about 2 000 games on 3min and 5min time on playok.com, and I found out that traps, sacrifices work much better. All you need is good tactics and you must learn how to save time.

Best for blitz is practise practise practise

My advice... stop wasting your time with Blitz. Stick with long games, acctually improve your chess instead of trying to make 40-50 moves in 5 minutes.

Please address the topic instead of creating a Blitz vs. Long chess argument, which I'm sure has been done already 100 times on this site.

 I play plenty of Long matches and correspondence games. Clearly Blitz is a different animal, but I like the fast pace, which makes it fun.

 Its like the difference between drinking an expensive bottle of wine with a fine meal vs. chugging down a cheap, ice-cold beer, after mowing the lawn.  Two different things, but both have their place.

I think it's important to:

1. Learn your opening theory well. So you can spit it out instantly in your sleep.

2. Do tactic drills every day with various excercises in books or here online

3. Learn all the traps in your choice of opening so you can use them and do not fall yourself into one

That should cover it. :-p

Yes, my question is:

"Where can I find resources that will help me do all those things?"

Books! for the openings, + watch other top players play the openings

Being a ~2000 1min player (on this site), I find the single most winning tactic is hiding your bishop on g2/b2 and your opponent forgetting about it. I've seen 1700 players make it to 1900 with this strat.

For 3 mins, learn an uncommon opening. Most people know the QBA/D very well, so I play the Benko, which hardly anyone knows. If they don't slip up they usually run out of time (im ~1750 blitz this site). Rare openings are your friends!

 For tactics, buy puzzle books and/or use the tactics trainer here on this site.

For opening rep buy a book that gives you a complete set of lines for your choice of opening.

Like if you are a 1. e4 player you want to get a book that covers lines against all the answers by black, everything from sicilian to french defence etc and not a book that is only about the ruy lopez or something like that.

Using databases to build your first opening rep might be tough I think. That might come in use later on when you look at alternative lines to your normal opening rep.

As an example I can explain what I did:

1. I bought Sam Collins Opening Rep book "An Attacking Repetoir for White". It gives lines for pretty much everything for the 1. e4 player.

2. I bought Survive and Beat Annoying Chess Openings by Schiller and studied all the traps and how to properly punish offbeat responses to my lines above.

3. I bought Speelmans "Modern Defence" for a complete rep for black.

4. I train with tactics trainer every day and I solve puzzle books on the toilet, bath and bus.

I think you can do well with "normal" openings even if you play blitz if you know your stuff. There are plenty of ways to go wrong there aswell. Ofcourse going for the pure gambit line approach works too for blitz I guess. Then I'd suggest getting one of those gambit play books and study them instead. I like my way because I can use the same lines in every type of game, CC and slow OTB games aswell where some gambit lines might not be as successful.

Interesting, I'll think about that, and look up those books. More advice please!

I go to a really good tactics training website to improve my middlegame.

I read endgame books to improve my endgame.

And I play drawish openings so I don't need to worry about opening knowledge.