Is blitz chess good for beginners?

I'm not going to mention my son's name, but his USCF rating history is public record.  He entered the top 10 for his age recently.  It's not difficult to figure out who he is.  The most surprising thing about his progress is that unlike most of the high rated kids his age, he hasn't been playing since he was a toddler.  He learned how to move the pieces one year and one month ago.

He was playing blitz before he played in his first tournament (November of last year) and has probably watched most of chessnetwork's bullet videos.  However, he balances that with plenty of long games (at clubs and tournaments and not online) as well as lots of tactical puzzles here, at chesskid.com, and with CT-Art, as well as in puzzle books.  He's memorized only two lines of one opening because at this stage it's all about tactics.  Soon though he'll probably need to start working on openings.

Kids like that will improve no matter what really... as long as they keep playing.

But just imagine how much better he'd be if he trained the "right" way 

To paraphrase an old song, if what we're doing is wrong, I don't wanna be right.

No. If you are looking to improve. Since blitz required fast calculations and good understanding of certain openings. 10 mins is like bullet game for me.

Just as blitz is good for a chess beginner, so is grand slalom for a beginning skiier:

For me standard time works better and I also find it more interesting and fun to look deeper into postions. Except if I just want to relax then I play blitz or even bullet.

Blitz is not needed to become a good player IMO you can do chess lessons and study games and openings you will see plenty of patterns.

To say that you don't need to think fast in a long game is balooney try to think slow in a slow game and your opponent will outcalculate you x10.

That being said I think perhaps some people can improve their game with blitz but we don't know what the factors behind it are, even GMs do not know the best way to learn chess, especially as each person is different.

Sounds like rationalization to me.

I think two kinds of players can benefit from blitz :

- experienced players who are strong enough to notice the mistakes they made during a blitz game and can draw an immediate lesson from it in a re-usable way

- players with good memory (especially youngsters), who can pick patterns along the way, without any conscious effort

For other people, it's debatable if blitz helps or hinders their development.

Fascinating.  

General question:  Approximately how many rated Blitz games (5/0) until a reliable rating emerges?

I was wondering the same thing if blitz chess helps or hurts your ability