Analyzing Your Blitz Games

“He who analyses blitz is stupid.”
— Rashid Nezhmetdinov

Super Nezh (IM Rashid Nezhmetdinov) is my favorite player of all time but I have to disagree with him on this quote. I've found that you can gain some insightful knowledge about how you play the opening, tactics you miss (or see) under time pressure, and what your intuition tells you to play under the time constraints of a 3 0 game. 

As I've gotten older (and hopefully wiser) I've become a more analytical chess player. I take my time, make sure I'm calculating clearly all the lines that I deem critical, etc. This is great for the demands of a classical game of chess.

Unfortunately, you just do not have enough time to do the above in blitz. Blitz you need to rely on your intuition and skimpy calculation. So if Super Nezh meant: "Do not be too hard on yourself when analyzing your blitz games" I would agree. But I like to take a look at how I played the opening; whether I remembered the moves I want to play. I like to see how I handled certain situations, under the duress of blitz time controls. This way you can test your intuition and see if you handled the situation correctly. After the game is over, you can go over the game and see how you would've played if you had that position in a classical game; and see if it matched up with what you played in the blitz game. Basically with blitz you get more positions to see what you "should've" played, in a shorter amount of time.

With all that said, let's go over a frustrating loss I had today: 

Puzzle #1:

What move did Black (me) play here?

For puzzle answers please visit: https://nmcraigclawitter.weebly.com/blog

Enjoy!