Bye Bye Blitz (for now)

This is a long overdue follow up to my 2021 article Boosting my Blitz and probably my last one on this topic for a while.  After some consideration I’ve decided to stop playing Blitz for now. The instigating factor was my discontent about my last two Blitz games played in April. My other Blitz games, earlier this year, were not great either.  This compelled me to dig a bit deeper into my Blitz performance. The more I discovered, the more I realized that playing Blitz isn't helping me much at the moment.

The two factors that mattered most

• My Blitz games aren't giving me enough feedback to learn from
• My Blitz rating is lower than my other formats because I'm not as good at playing Blitz

It will take dedicated effort to improve my Blitz and that's not my current priority, I'd rather park Blitz for now until I have enough time and motivation to make a real effort.

Lack of Learning

Most games are played badly, without giving me interesting insights. I analyze every game I play to see what I can learn from my mistakes. For Blitz games, the observation was always the same: I make bad decisions because I don’t have enough time to evaluate/calculate my decision. The positions themselves are often not beyond my comprehension, I just need to get there faster.

In sharp contrast are my Daily games. I make way less mistakes in Daily games, but when I do they are meaningful. Every mistake in a Daily game is a deliberate decision that turns out to be the wrong one. They are harsh confrontations to face, because I went wrong with my eyes open. They require deeper investigations to fully understand why I went wrong, but afterwards I have a better understanding of my thinking and my flaws.

My last two Blitz games were played in April and both of them were featured in my article My Mistakes in April, one of them in the chapter Drama on Defense, the other under the chapter Endgame Errors.

I’m not as good playing Blitz

My idea that the gap between my Rapid and Blitz is temporary, yet will decrease over time, is wrong. Contrary to the evidence presented to me, I held a persistent belief that my rating for each format would end up in line with each other. I was convinced that the gap between my Rapid and Blitz would decrease over time. I no longer believe that.

In the past couple of months I haven’t played enough games to provide a good enough sample size, but reassessing my earlier numbers changed my mind.

In my previous article Boosting my Blitz I wrote about how I needed 200 games to get to a 1000 rating. In the months that followed, I played 93 more games to get to a 1100 rating before I stopped again. Playing 100 or 200 games to gain 100 rating points doesn’t sound too bad, but it’s way too many when you believe it’s just a correction to my actual rating. After almost 800 games, can I really make an argument that my rating doesn’t reflect my skill level? 

Playing higher rated players

What definitively opened my eyes was looking up my stats against higher rated Blitz players. Against 1200+ rated players, I only have 2 wins. 

Duckfest vs shunter69
According to my chess.com stats page, my best win is my game vs shunter69, which I won by resignation. This was the final position.

Resignation is usually because a player sees no way to win the game from the current position or sometimes because they are bored out of their mind. But these options don’t sound plausible in this scenario. My opponent had more than 4 minutes left and resigned after thinking for a minute and a half. I’m not a mind reader, but I’m pretty sure this was due to reasons outside of chess.com.

My best win was caused by a distraction, like a phone call or another interruption.   

Duckfest vs Roberto13montrmayor

This was actually a pretty good game. At least by ~1200 Blitz standards.  And, that's most likely what I should use as my standard. My 1100-1200 Blitz rating is most likely my actual Blitz rating.

Bye Bye Blitz

Slowly I came to accept that I am not as good at playing Blitz as I am playing Rapid or Daily, but I’m still wondering why. Undeniably, I play worse when I have less time, but the same should count for my opponent. It puzzles me that the gap is so wide between different formats, Rapid and Daily are both about 400 points higher.

Part of the issue is that Blitz was never a priority for me. That’s why I never applied full focus. And in recent months I didn't play enough games to get into the play faster mindset.  Both focus and dedicating more time playing Blitz will both be required to improve my rating. 

My decision to avoid Blitz for now is temporary. Sometime in the future I’ll give it another go and when I do, I’m going to commit to it fully. 

Thank you all for reading. Let me know your thoughts.