Should I play Bullet, Blitz, and Rapid if I suck?....Yes

I have heard the advice that you shouldn't play bullet, blitz, or rapid till you have decent grasp of the game. I understand why its sound advice. If you don't know what your doing its unlikely your going to win and even less likely that you will make significant gains in learning. You should focus on doing lessons , learning a couple of openings and playing daily games where you can take your time and come up with decent moves. Then when you have a grasp of some fundamentals and your daily rating starts climbing you take a stab at rapid or blitz.

I get it. For me this sounded like good advice and until this past year, really the past few months I didn't really bother with bullet, blitz, or rapid games for the most part.  Though up until this past year I hadn't really tried to sit down and learn any openings either. I did what lessons and puzzles I could for free. Then I got my diamond membership and started doing alot more of both.

Still my bullet, blitz, and rapid scores are nothing to write home about. Quite frankly they make me want to hang my head in shame but I cannot see the board when I do that so...

How do I justify playing these faster games when I am mostly losing. Here is my current philosophy.

The old admonition about you getting out what you put in comes to mind. Besides time and effort you are putting in expectation. It's this, expectation, that is perhaps the most important. If you expect to win and you lose then that can be quite a blow. What I am suggesting here is not that you should expect to lose but that you have a realistic view of your current ability. This allows you to set a proper expectation and to maximize the benefits.

My daily ELO is barely four digits. That's when I play slow. When I play fast I am barely hanging on to three digits. Obviously, I do not know the game well enough but how to use these faster games to learn anything or what can I learn from these experiences?

Well, if I have learned anything so far it is that patience wins more games than it loses. One of the hardest things to do is play under pressure especially time pressure. The clock is ticking and you are not making a move. Do you want to lose on time? If there is one thing I hate its losing on time or winning on time for that matter. Not that I am above running out the clock when I can. Still losing on time is the worst especially when post game analysis shows that you were more accurate than your opponent. So I would have likely won if only I'd had more time. This is the sort of thing that makes me want to pull my hair out especially when I am substantially more accurate than my opponent. It is not conducive to promoting patience. The thing is that anxiety is the enemy of clear thinking. If you can't think clearly because the clock is ticking then you are doomed.

Learn to ignore the clock. Ignore the ELO. This is really hard.   I've beaten higher rated players and lost to lower rated players. In the former case I often figured from the outset that I was doomed. It freed me up. It was actually less pressure because I expected to lose and my main focus became not completely embarrassing myself. Interesting. In the latter case I thought I couldn't lose because surely someone with ELO a hundred points lower than mine was no threat.  

Focus on what matters and what matters most is accuracy. If you are more accurate than your opponent you should win. If you just toss out random moves out of impatience you will only find out who sucks less not who is actually better. I hate losing on time but there is one thing I hate more and that is winning when review shows my opponent was more accurate. It tells me I am not really better I just worked the clock better. I am not in this to learn time management. I am in this to be a better chess player. Yes, a win is a win but it can a bitter pill to swallow when I know my opponent is technically better. And yes time management is important but I don't want to win on time.

  Be hard on yourself in the right way.  So yeah maybe you don't know how to make the right moves yet but still the faster games can help build your mental game in subtle ways that will matter over the long term. If you lose on time but are more accurate then you know your moving in the right direction. Use these faster games with the goal of, say, sharpening your opening skills. How many times have you reviewed and you have several missed opportunities in opening. How about inaccuracies, mistakes, and blunders?

Maybe your losing, maybe you barely made it to the middle game because the clock ran out on you but if you had zero misses, zero mistakes, zero blunders then you are well on your way.

Develop and trust your intuition. I don't know about anyone else but often a move suggests itself to me. I'm sitting there and I get the urge to make a move then I hesitate and impulsively make another move. Maybe things go well after that maybe they don't but what's more frustrating is seeing, during review, that the impulse I had, the move I chose to not make was actually the best move. You develop your instincts through experience. Learn to distinguish between the flights of fancy and a truly gut move. This takes time. So even if you are losing these fast games but your opening performance is rated excellent or better then you know your making progress.  There is plenty of room for nuance here and one size most certainly does not fit all. But the right perspective can help you find little nuggets of gold in the rubble of defeat and keep you moving forward.

Just remember a sketchy plan is better than no plan. So when I play faster games I try to remember to keep the proper perspective so I can get something out of the experience.