are Blitz games good or bad for developing chess skills?

I love blitz

Blitz is fun, absolutely. It's especially fun when I play against my elementary students on a daily basis before school and during lunch. I have a very good electronic chess clock and set it for 5 minutes. The kids love to bang on the button.  Maybe I should purchase a cheaper clock for school.

Playing slow chess against the computer can work and it's also fun.  

Playing against Fritz 12 on slow time controls or in training mode feels like a real chess game against a real person, plus I found it most instructive. It's pretty amazing.

I have taken the Dan Heisman challenge and am now playing slow chess games against Fritz 12. I created a balanced player set to 1650 elo with blunder set to one pawn. Arg! I still lost a pawn to the blasted machine!

I didn't bother with the opening book in the example below, just to give basic opening principles a try. As it was set to training, the Fritz character would caution me now and then to think of a better move - so there were a few take backs, but no engine moves.

At my current playing strength, it was extremely difficult to get Fritz to resign! This game lasted for about one hour. Next time I'll give myself two hours and try and see if I can decrease the take back warnings.

I'm sharing this information and game only for the purpose of showing how a chess program can benefit one's chess skills through slow play. It feels like a real chess game.   My game needs so much work to play well against this 1650 elo computer character, and that's just fine. I have the time to think!   

I learned after the game that Fritz used the Nimzo Indian Defense. It was something new for me.

 Well, that puts this matter to rest.

resting with suntan lotion, looking for groundhogs

I think that blitz does improve your chess. It helps most obviously with time management, but it also helps with other things. It helps with calculation, or so I would think, because forcing yourself to calculate at a faster speed is at least good practice. It also helps with pattern recognition. Another thing it does is it helps with your opening, and getting used to new opening positions.

That's a rather silly over-generalization.  The big benefit of speed chess is that you get to SEE many, many positions.  And, if you're lucky enough to play people who are a bit better than you you'll be crushed, and crushed often.   If you've got any intellectual curiosity or just wish to get better you'll go ahead and look and see why you keep getting crushed.

My basic point is that if you want to get better you should, first play the kind of chess you LIKE TO PLAY and do some studying to try to plug holes in your game.  Now, it's true that I didn't really get into speed chess until my uscf ratin was around 1600, but I didn't really play any slow chess for years and when i started playing in slower tourneys again my rating peaked at over uscf 2000. 

One thing about blitz is, it allows you to play a lot of games in a short time. You get exposure to many different variations and positions and styles. Often you don't have time to calculate everything and evaluate all the things properly, but still you get a sense of the positions. Correspondence demands you to invest a lot of time expenditure and effort into a small number of positions that you may never encounter later. Quite often after long brainstorming in correspondence you end up playing the same move that you would have played with a few seconds thought.

So, besides being  (maybe) fun, blitz could actually be a more economical way of learning. Okay it is a theory and I am not totally sure about this, but I am pretty sure that a tennis player's training typically consists of hitting a lot of forehands every day (even if some of them miss), and is not structured around hitting just a few maximally accurate forehands. Some balance between quantity and quality is needed of course, but for training purposes quantity may be more important than quality.

So let's make a pro con analysis:

BLITZ PRO:

You see many variations, in limited time. More time to study puzzles/books.

You quickly form a database of weaknesses quickly. You make impulsive moves that show your TRUE intuition while playing, not just your cautious calculating intuition.

You see a lot more openings and patterns, with 1-depth moves/plans.

You learn about time management and how horrible you are under time pressure. It also helps fight anxieties and those 'butterflies'/cold-hands if you ever had them.

BLITZ CON:

You supposedly don't learn much positional gameplay with blitz.  I confess if someone asked me how to play positionally, I wouldn't be able to write it down on paper.

You see a lot of interesting combinations with long games, that are 3-4 moves deep sometimes and strengthen your calculation powers.

All your opponents are a bit tougher.

This conversation comes up a lot...

Once again...

In ANYTHING you don't need to absorb everything that is going on.  But, cut out the unnecessary and only pay attention to the root of the task. 

This is the main benefit to blitz.  It teaches you when to think and to recognize the keys to a position much more quickly.  

Blitz is like American beer: cheap and poor quality, but it satifies certain cravings.

I don't think learning how to play blitz would hurt you, I mean, if you're not even able to do it -- like you said you crumble in time pressure so it seems like it'd have some pros for you.  You learn to assess the threats quickly and then the general idea of the position quickly.  Not deeply, you're just learning how to arrive at ok judgements fast, so don't be afraid of playing a so-so move, don't dig and dig for an answer or you'll never speed up, this is what blitz is and why it wont help the chess understanding itself.

I always wonder about people who can't play blitz (Ziryab did you say you were one of these players or maybe it was Elubas?).  After your opponent makes their move do you immediately see the threat or a tactic?  Or do you have to look a long time to see it (or is it the time pressure that causes you to go blind in a sense?)  Because the difference between 1200 and 1600 is a lot, 1200 means you're just missing one move shots.

My blitz rating is consistently 100 points higher than my standard, is it like a acceleration vs max speed?  My initial read of the board may be much better than yours, let say I'm seeing lots of stuff in 10-20 seconds but after a minute you've caught up and keep going where I may start to stall and by 2-3 minutes any progress I make in my thinking is comparatively slow.

Nope. Wasn't me. I know that blitz has ruined my game the same way that fine beverages tax my liver. But I play blitz better under the influence of such beverages than a lot of players half my age.

Blitz is very unpredictable and sometimes can be quite annoying. On a good day I have beaten a 1590 in exactly 10 moves, or a 1600 fairly nicely. On any other day, I might lose on time to a 1220. On some other day, like last night, I might lose 2 games to a 1320 pretty badly on time & positionally.

Therefore, if you are playing blitz chess, you have absolutely ZERO way of predicting whether you are improving or getting worse. It's completely inaccurate, you can simply hope your rating is trending upward and not downward.

I think I've become really slow in chess. 5-min games have become hard for me to do. I've been taking more than 6-12 minutes to solve tactical problems (I guess they are getting too hard now).

For me whatever site I'm playing on I can get a good feel for what strength my blitz is because each successive set of 100 rating points has their own feel.  I don't find it random at all.

It should be a good skill.

good skill for checkers

Blitz has pros and contras. The most important thing is you really know what you are doing (and what you are after). Even if you have no idea what you are doing, I still think most people here underestimate the benefit of playing blitz, mostly because you cannot see the good result as immediate as you can see it's (temporary) bad effect to your slow game.

I get seeks for 40-45 minute games fairly quickly on ICC most of the time.

The lower the amount of time, the higher the unpredictability, so blitz/bullet games should be used to strengthen your ability to handle time pressure and your pattern recognition.

They can be fun sometimes, but you can also lose to someone rated 600 points below you.

I don't play them. I want to be able to force positions and tactics rather than work on spotting them after blunders. If I want quick tactical positions I'll play the tactics trainer.