Tell me what's so great about playing a 15 minute game against someone who is just going to trade off all the pieces and get to a drawn endgame? The idea that most long time control games are going to be high quality is stupid.
This portion looks commentable. Firstly, long time control games may not all be high quality (look at my last few standard games, I missed pieces and missed mates) but they are better than blitz games. More time to think, fewer mistakes on average.
Secondly, what makes you think people will just trade off pieces to reach a drawn endgame? There are multiple issues with that first quoted sentence:
- Trading pieces is not easy. No trade is a fair trade, and part of playing good chess is being able to tell which trades benefit you or your opponent.
- Trading pieces does NOT mean a drawn endgame. In fact, most endgames, by virtue of a slightly better-placed piece or pawn structure, are won for one side if the technique is there. Also, most people (myself included) tend to botch the endgame without even realising it, with the evaluation swinging from win to draw to loss to win in a few moves.
- Is a drawn endgame boring? Useless? Not beneficial to your chess? As above, most people botch endgames and if you can notice these chances, grab them and throttle your opponents.
- Even if the game is a draw, is it not instructive to play the game and see why it ended up a draw? If you're just mindlessly trading (or accepting trades of) pieces, that's not good chess, and is an area for improvement.
- Do you consider a draw a waste of time?
Well, not to launch a personal attack here. These are issues that many beginners (not just yourself) have. If you just want to have fun and improve at your own pace, what you're doing is fine. I play 5|0 for days I can't really be bothered to think and just want a quick fix too. But if you want to get serious and improve as fast as you can, then taking most of the sensible advice from the forum would be good.
Also, to add on to deafzed's points, tactics are the foundation of chess. Strategy and planning means nothing if you miss your opponent's dropped pieces/tactics or worse, give your opponent free pieces/tactics. And talk of a chess "style" is not applicable until you're past 2700 FIDE. (Only half-sarcastic here, the point is that until you can thoroughly understand [?] any position on the board, there is not much style to talk about. Picking between entering dynamically balanced complications or an equal technical game is style. Missing a winning tactic just because you don't like forcing moves or the resulting complications is not style.)
Here is an article featuring games by beginners reviewed by Dan Heisman.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bGQR5Ec4DoUJ:http://www.chesscafe.com/text/heisman46.pdf%2Bmaster+vs+amateur&hl=en&gbv=2&ct=clnk