I came to the forums looking for ways to make myself play faster.
I have played a few three minute games and even though I am winning the game generally, I lose on time - 12 to 17 seconds. I am wondering what you think about the 10 minute games or even the 15/10 games? I enjoy those, occasionally losing on time but usually, just losing ;)
I am not a big league player or anything. I just like chess.
There are many things wrong with chess, and many easy solutions. Aside from allowing people to go to the bathroom during chess games, allowing people to premove is the next biggest problem and the next easiest to correct.
The problem with premoves is that there is no analog in real life. In real life, people cannot play 1 minute games, less yet 15 second games. It takes time to physically move a piece, a natural limit. Without that natural limit, chess games become shorter and shorter. Chess becomes a contest between people who are good at chess versus people who have an expensive mouse. A good chess player will always lose on time against an expensive mouse owner. After a generation, the chess community becomes inundated with people who became interested in chess only because they owned expensive mouses and not because they liked chess. Without expensive mouses, they would have become interested in something else. This is an artificial boost to the size of the chess community.
This creates a moral hazard for sites like chess.com. Chess.com will encourage speed play more and more in order to draw more and more audience. By catering to high speed games, chess.com further distorts the market until all real chess enthusiasts are alienated. Bobby Fischer would be rolling in his grave if he saw the state of chess today. Every game ends in a time out. Both players make upwards of 60 moves in 60 seconds and each one is random, a guess based on what move they thought the opponent might make. Every move is a blunder, which makes a mockery of the game, and chess is no longer respectable. It's worse than chess boxing and is the reason Bobby Fischer first invented his patented Fischer clock to enable people to play high pressure games that can actually still reach checkmate.
This situation is similar to high school debate clubs. For anyone not familiar, debate clubs used to compete on arguments but now they compete on speed reading. Every sport tries to evolve in order to remain relevant. Notoriously, basketball players are not allowed to play zone. They are required to match up man against man. This is in order to discourage team work and manufacture star players whose likeness can be used to sell copyrighted jersey t-shirts. We need to oppose modern trends in chess in order to prevent its commercialization and keep it pure.
Another issue contributing to the phenomenon of short games is the fact that the major chess websites such as the ICC refuse to disqualify players with bad internet connections. Legitimate players are afraid to play long games because illegitimate players will pull out their ethernet cables when they start losing, and you will be punished for beating them by having to sit there and wait for all the time on their clocks to run out before you are allowed to file an appeal against the administrator for adjourning the game.
In order to save chess, we must take the money out of it by making it less flashy and exciting so that websites cannot become large and bloated with decadent features like premove, and are instead forced to focus resources on core elements.