How blitz and bullet rotted my brain (don't let it rot yours)

Congrats on the results, Chuddog.

Your tale also makes intuitive sense.  If someone wanted to get better at basketball, say, and spent all of his time playing 3v3 pickup at the park, he would get better ... but not as good as he could get.  If he instead spent that time practicing exact drills and techniques approved by a coach, ones that mimicked real game scenarios, he would improve much faster.  Pickup basketball is fun, for sure, but not the main road for improving one's game.

The same is true for chess.  Blitz can be very fun, but we all know training tactics is probably the most important thing you can do for your chess.  If your goal is to have fun, playing blitz is fine.  If you seriously want to improve, study tactics instead.  And if you want a bit of both, do both.  Makes perfect sense.

I'd love to see a game or two, chuddog.

Congratulations chuddog, I'm glad to hear about your recent success. I will play my next tournament game in 3 weeks and will employ your method until then. Let's see how it turns out :)

Dear chuddog, thanks for your advices. Daniel Gormally wrote in one of his books that blitz was harming his game, he was addicted to it, and this took a lot of time he should use to improve his game. Botvinik was absolutely convinced that blitz would influence negatively his game, but Tal was playing blitz all the time against everybody.

I think that if somebody begin early with blitz, the negative effects of it would be not so strong as to people who begin to play intensively blitz as adults.

I am a patzer, but I am intelligent enough to recognise that playing blitz is absolutely horrible for my game. In the time I played a lot of blitz I was getting mated by people who barely know the rules and get regularly crushed when in times where I stop blitz.

And here you are still playing blitz.

Very nice post. As I'm trying to improve (I'm nowhere close to being in your league), I'm trying to play daily or over-the-board chess. I play nothing faster than rapid (10 min.).

I'm way down the pecking order but I also agree. Blitz is great because you get to have a game there and then live with a short amount of time, but it encourages such poor play when translating back to slow chess. I was addicted to bullet, I got to the 50% win rate and then called it quits. Only play daily chess now and my game is slowly improving over a long haul. By that I mean the initial settling period of what rating I am was a bit higher than now but overall I feel my game has improved a lot more.

100% agree. I never played (because I hated) blitz chess even as a boy, and now at the age of 63 my game is deteriorating due to age anyway, so I don't want to do anything that will make it go downhill any faster. I'm not sure if lightning chess( 5 or 10 seconds per move)  counts as blitz (5 minutes to finish whole game) but I was always happier playing that form of chess if I was going to have to play faster. The beeping of the clock in this form even though it's a very short amount of time between moves it forces you to think rather than move right away as you have to do in bullet or 5 minute chess, so I don't think it's as bad for your chess. Of course you can blunder or lose on time because of complications created by an opponent but that mirrors the normal long game.

Here is my favorite game from the tournament, against the highest rated player in the field. He ended up coming in second.

 

In case anyone is wondering, I didn't do this detailed analysis just because I have an excess of time and altruism that I'm spending on posting in forums. I plan to use this analysis in my next article in the chess magazine column I write.

 

 

nice exciting game!

I've had a similar experience over the last couple weeks. Just came back to chess after a several month break and I told myself I wasn't going play blitz when I opened this account. Yeah that lasted about a week. I ran into one of those 2000 rated "grandmasters" that plague online rapid pools and it turned me off to long games so I started playing a bunch of blitz. I've lost my last several rapid games due to poor time management, making silly blunders that I shouldn't make, and missing wins I shouldn't miss. Also lost 100 points on TT. Today I decided I'm gonna play 3-5 blitz games a day at most instead of 20-30 games and spend more time on training. I just went from ~1960 tactics to an all time high of 2100. Maybe tomorrow I'll play some rapid and see if I can avoid playing like a total idiot. 

I Agee with the OP. I've been a member for 7 plus years and just recently tried Blitz. For less than 50 games, it has already corrupted my tactical ability going back to longer time control. If there is anything good I learned from playing Blitz, I don't waste as much time on my opening moves. 

 

The shift from standard chess to quicker time controls like blitz requires immense board vision and tactical vision, as time is much more limited. As a result, tactics which players would spot in standard games may not be identified in time in a blitz game. 50 games of blitz are not really sufficient practice for blitz; I am sure my first ever 50 attempts in blitz are terrible. Perhaps you can return to longer time controls temporarily until you are confident of shaving off the maximum total time on the board.

 

Quicker and more time-efficient calculations (note that I write efficient, not accurate, since accuracy to great depth is not as important in timed games where time is a great factor to consider) in blitz games. But to do this, tactical training and pattern familiarity is required in heavy depth.

 

As a permanent bullet player, unfortunately, my ability to calculate has been greatly hampered.

😂😂😂😂

Personally, my rating has moved from a 1000 to a 1300 over this summer by just playing blitz...

I only play blitz when I am waiting that my Daily Games finished (you know the thing: some players take vacations when they are losing, so you have to be very patient). After all my games are finish I analyse them all before I start with a new round. But try to wait three daily games to finish, sitting in front of your computer - it is almost impossible. So in such moments I play blitz, and usually I hate it, also because I am such a horrible blitz player. :-D.

But at the moment I can say that what I play say in a year would be what most people here would play in a week or two - this is almost nothing.

Thanks. I'm surprised nobody else commented, since so many people asked me to post games.

I think I have to come later to check the game; a lot of interesting and complex moves. For sure a perfect game to be analysed in an article.

Funny these correlations! Good to know. Some days I simply cannot see anything in tactics. Sometimes I begin rather good and after one or two simple mistakes I lose the confidence and get chess blind, losing a lot of points. I should probably do once what a strong player suggested (Alex Smith, I think), to do sometimes a lot of tactics to get immerse in this world. Rather the opposite from what some people say, to do just something per day.

Great game chud!! Congrats on winning the tournament.

Thanks. I hope the game + my analysis is useful to people. I might post another one when time permits.