Pros/Cons of playing Blitz Games??

Just wanted to get everyone's take on Blitz games....

my overall progress has been steadily  improving over the last few months from a rating of 700 to now almost 1400 in live play....and nearly 1500 in turn-based...without any blitz games

so that brings me to my question ???

how will Blitz games benefit/ hinder my future performance....

-God speed

Chess is like any other skill, you get better with study/practice.

So pick any skill as an example... musical instruments, ball games, computer programing, building a table :p whatever.  If you did these things as fast as you could all the time would you get much better or would you just get really fast at the things you can already do?  Would slowing down help improve the quality?

It's the same with chess.  Blitz is fun, but you're not building your skill, you're just doing what you already know really fast.  And if that's all you do, then you'll undoubtedly be practicing your mistakes and it can end up hurting your overall ability as you ingrain these bad patterns into your head.

Occasional blitz games never hurt anyone (as far as I know :) and Botvinnik even recommended blitz-like games to help those who have poor time management due to moving too slowly.

@ Wafflemaster - RE: Mikhail Botvinnik's blitz recommendation/quote - Please provide a hyperlink.  Thx. 

playing blitz helps you to look faster for better moves than not playing it, and you may get to think right away the right variation.

Blitz might actually become a much needed skill for tournament chess simply because the trend is for play offs. It is a feature of a number of GM tourneys now and it is possible a "trickle down" to lower level competition will occur. I have an opinion on that: I hope not!

Blitz, as mentioned, is a quick and painless (rating wise) method for getting a lot of impressions about a new opening one wants to play in tourney chess. Also, blitz is mainly intuition and tactics. Quick sight of tactics can be sharpened.

But don't over do it, like with everything else. Blitz is fun but shouldn't fill up much of your available study, practice and playing time.

It is useful for practicing openings and finding holes in your repertoire.

I don't know, it's a fairly well known piece of Botvinnik advice, and I read it in a real book so you'll have to google it yourself

Well ok, I'll help you out a little... here's a blog site anyway, it's on the 5th bullet point: http://chess.snitselaar.org/2009/09/thoughts-on-training-from-botvinnik.html

He didn't mean 3 minute games, more like what this site calls standard live games I'm sure.