Using Your Blitz Games to Get Better at "Actual" Chess
Blitz is fun. That's why there is very few long games going on at chess.com. Usually your playing on chess.com is for fun and not for prize money or official rating gains.
But wouldn't it be awesome if you could use your blitz playing to get better at OTB official tournaments? Well there's a way! Blitz is a great way to get a lot of unique positions in a little amount of time. After you're done with a "blitz sesh" it's a great idea to go over the game and look at where you deviated from GM play. You can either cross reference your game on chessbase (if you have it) or on opening explorer (here on chess.com). You should go over the game and see where you deviated and whether you like the GMs play or your play better; sometimes I actually like the way I played it better but it's important to see WHY the GM played the other move.
After you've gone over some games like this, you'll be much more at home with all these unique blitz positions. You'll see yourself meeting this same openings in your actual play and already know what to do. It is more important to see the WHY of the actual moves, than what the different moves were. This is because you can use the WHY in a wide range of similar positions, but only the WHAT in that one position. Hopefully this makes sense; I realize I'm probably not explaining what I'm trying to say very well. To cure that ambiguity, let's go over a few examples from my own blitz play and you can better see what I'm getting at:
The rare, but tricky, O'Kelly Sicilian. What should White play here?
