Blitz and Bullet are not chess

98% of all chess games are played at such a low level that they are not very instructive and they are not very educational. Does this make those games "not chess"??

The fact that bullet and blitz is meant to pass time when one is bored does not make bullet and blitz as "not chess".

 The fact that most bullet and blitz chess is not educational or instructive does not make bullet or blitz as "not chess".

LOL, this is all just hilarious!   bullet/blitz chess is certainly chess, but it cannot be taken seriously for the time controls are just too fast for any complex analysis.   Boris Spassky once said, "in blitz, I can be beaten by ANYONE"!   Chess life too recently had an article regarding the drop in playing strength as time controls get faster.   Maybe the best thing speed chess is for is to help you learn to see patterns faster.  Merry Christmas to all!

Agreed. I need to play more rapid games.

A good chess player needs self discipline to improve, he cannot be pushed into playing chess and the limit should be made by the player not the site and a lot of people come on chess.com to stray away from their usual long otb games like me. 

Lol i just bumped this 1 year old post

Yeah, blitz and especially bullet is not chess. Speed chess is almost as skill-less as checkers.

These variants are still part of chess and requires good technique to play, though the set of skills in long control chess is different from the set of skills in speed chess.

Relying on bullet alone is definitely insufficient for training up to play standard chess. Obviously on average the moves played in bullet chess are inferior to that coming from long controls since we are forced to utilise a shortage time at its furthest limit. In turn, this can affect a player's ability to calculate moves deeply and appreciate chess at its finest.

Similarly, relying on long time controls alone is definitely insufficient as well. Compared to speed chess, long games take up much more time than speed games. For a one to two hour game, I can easily complete ten blitz games lasting no more than six minutes per game. Much more things can be learned from ten games than one game, and I am sure that for good players, the quality of play in speed games is not that much inferior than in long games.

There is no hard and fast rule as to what time control would be most suitable for any player. For most players, a good idea is to play controls of 30 min to 1 hour per side for most of the games and then include a few blitz games as part of the 'time test'. Personally, I am very thankful that I started my chess journey on fast controls of 5 min per side; I would not have achieved as much as what I have done up to today had I started out on longer controls back then. Nowadays, I play timeless games over the board but no more than 3 min per side for online games.

The World Blitz champion is also the World Chess Champion. He finished tied 2nd-5th in rapid chess. The best "chess" players are also the best blitz players.

I'm old and slow, so this is a statement against my own interest. Quit complaining about blitz and faster time controls and spend that energy learning to play the game better.

fuck off mate

My favorite John Adams quote: "One useless man is called a disgrace, two of them are called a law firm, three of them are called a Congress and four of them are called a Bullet Quad."

Of course masters are the best at blitz, they are the masters and will always be the best at any form of 'chess'. That's totally irrelevant to the fact that at the other end of the world it is the worst chess players who resort to bullet and short blitz in order to have any livelihood at all while living with the fact that they are apparently 'afraid of chess.' It is human nature to hit and run quickly from something you fear.

@JinjaJewGoil - very interesting idea, thank you! I'll add that playing mainly bullet chess could be also a clear sign of laziness - being afraid of hard work and going short-cuts in chess skills development instead

I don't think that Blitz or Bullet are less genuine a version of chess than long form chess. The question I would be more interested in getting an answer to would be this: "Are players who consistently win 1, 3, 5, and 10 minute games of chess the same people who consistently win longer games?" Likewise; are the same people who win consistently at 1-3 minute games the same who win at 5-10 minute games etc.? Are there people, and how many of them are there, who can win consistently at Blitz, but lose longer games, and vis-versa? 

Things I hate about bullet chess, from the perspective of a middling player:

1. Players are rewarded for thoughtlessness---shallow and superficial moves give you a huge time edge. If you think deeply, you often end up burning so much of your clock that even though you are in a winning line, you'll run out of time to bring it to bring it to fruition. 

2. Defensive play is excessively rewarded---Piling all your pieces on defense creates a situation where the attacking player has to consider a million possibilities as to how to break your defense, while you only have to think about nullifying his moves. It usually takes much less time to react to your opponent's moves than to come up with any creative ideas of your own. So this is basically a variation of #1---players who don't try to come up with a plan are rewarded.

3. 99% of people on this website will never resign. I find it unbelievably insulting that people will resort to pawn shuffling or cheap "surprise" moves in order to win on time or induce a blunder, when the game was lost long ago. 

Long story short, I don't consider bullet chess to be real chess at anything short of an elite level. Because at a low-to-middle level, the clock is not a feature of the game. It IS the game. Countless players make no effort to disguise that their goal from move 1 is to win on time. Their entire approach is designed to burn time rather than improve their position.

I’ve looked at your own bullet games. At your level (1400), the vast majority of the games are won or lost on the board, not on time.