Are there benefits to playing blitz or bullet as a beginner?

(My responses in bold above)

There are far more drawbacks as a beginner to playing speed chess than benefits. I’d learn how to play chess with some proficiency before diving into the speed chess arena. Primarily speed chess can create bad habits and thought processes that’ll slow your overall chess growth. 

-Jordan

@1

"As a beginner should you play any fast games at all" ++ No

"From what rating does playing blitz make sense to improve your game and why?"
++ Blitz never improves, it is for fun only.
Improvement comes from analysis of lost games. It is not worth it to analyse blitz.

"What would be a good ratio spending time between slow games, study and fast games?"
50% slow games e.g. 15|10, 50% analysis, 0% fast games.

"Do fast games make you think quicker?"
++ No, it is the other way around: slow games grow an intuition you need for blitz.

"What do fast games teach you about time control?"
++ 1|0 bullet grows you a confidence that you can play 60 moves in 1 minute in time trouble.

Hi! Yes there are benefits playing Blitz but be careful about Bullet games.

Let me tell you a little about my experience with Biltz. I learned the fundamentals  of the game at my local chess club (children's school of chess-say up to 14 years old)  where strong /titled players (some of them eventually became CM, FM, IM, GM, national champions...) were educated. An important share of the activities was to play 5/0 Blitz under the watch of our instructors -some were tematic i.e. only pawns, specific openings, but of course other were just normal games. Short tournemnts were organized and small prizes (i.e. old magazines) given to the best placed. So playing Blitz is beneficial no doubt.

At the time I never heard of bullet time control instead, and never played either (I think the shortest time control was 4/0 when in blitz tournements with handicap vs lower rated players, e.g. 7/0 vs 4/0). Bullet is something that was just possible with digital clocks that allow precision and of course in on-line play. I would not recommend a beginner to spend too much time playing bullets, perhaps 5-10% maximum of the total chess activities, and mainly for fun.

Good luck!

thank you for all your thoughtful answers!

This is a hot topic with people on either side. I am well aware I am in the minority here, but I am an advocate of blitz play for improving players. In 2019, I was 600. In 2022, I broke 2100. I did this by almost exclusively playing blitz (rapid accounts for about 10% of my games, and even then, most of that is 10+0).

How did I improve then? Well - I learnt about chess through study, lessons, tactics, youtube, etc then applied what I knew in blitz, analysing games and refining openings.
Whilst I never practiced rapid, whenever I dabled back into rapid, my overall strength had vastly improved and I gained rapid rating points rather quickly. There is definitely a downside to this: A blitz player has the potential to be too shallow with calculation and/or impatient when playing longer time controls - but with enough practice and discipline, this can be limited.
It really depends on what you want to play though.

The short answer - play what you enjoy. I'd never have enjoyed playing longer games, so if I was told that was the only way to improve, I'd probably not have hung about long enough to get good. If you enjoy blitz, play it, that's the most important thing. If you don't, play rapid. You will improve at both. Whether you improve 10% faster doing one over the other is par for the course if playing for fun!

If you simply just play blitz and dont analyse or don't learn/study chess on top of that - improvement will be limited, you need to make sure you're still learning, but the same would apply to an extent in rapid too.

I'd avoid bullet though. It's usually too fast for a beginner or improving player to derive anything meaningful from that and will probably just hinder development by making you too impatient even in blitz games. Start off with 5+0 or 3/5 min games with an increment to build experience.

From what rating does playing blitz make sense to improve your game and why?
What would be a good ratio spending time between slow games, study and fast games?

Benefits of fast chess is you get experience of a lot of different openings in a short space of time. Assuming you analyze your games afterwards, which is important, then you get very fast feedback on how you are doing and how you can do better.

If you want to become a strong player, then more time should be spent playing slow games than blitz games. Because too much blitz creates bad habits that spill over into your slower chess games.

Do fast games make you think quicker? (Seems like the blunder rate can be high)

Not much. Blitz and bullet games force you to make quicker decisions and that is why they have a high blunder rate as you point out. Moves are generally played on instinct and intuition. It can be harmful for slower games because finding good moves involves a lot of thinking and that takes time.

I would say there is absolutely no benefit. 15/10 is a good time control for beginner to intermediate players.  With too little time you'll simply never have time to do anything but get practice using a mouse.  Conversely, too much time is not great either because you need at least a certain amount of experience to even make use of the time.  If  your calculation ability isn't up to where more time is useful, you're wasting time imho. 

It will have a negative impact on your game, and in my opinion, profoundly negative.  Some puzzle rush for mouse speed is all you need to play blitz / bullet at whatever level you are capable.  But playing slower games is the only thing that will help you think better and improve.

It developed my intuition / tactics a lot, but gave me some bad habits which I struggled with during a few OTB tournament. 

No.

The traditional answer is speed chess is poison.

But a practical observation is that kids who improve tremendously quickly play all sorts of time controls, and a LOT of games... although the cause and effect is unclear. Playing an obsessive number of games across every different time control indicates passion, and that may be the real reason they improve so much so quickly.

Anyway, even super star young players play lots of long games and do serious study. No one with any sense will tell you that the best way to improve is to exclusively play fast games.

Here's a good, relevant discussion that's gotten a lot of mileage here.

https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/how-blitz-and-bullet-rotted-my-brain-don-t-let-it-rot-yours

Back when I was a beginner, I did play quite a bit of fast games but found they didn't help. You should be playing mostly Rapid. No need for classical, unless you enjoy that

just don't play bullet as beginner.