Rapid / Blitz versus longer games for learning

I've been playing a few months. I started playing 10 minute time controls because I got into too much time trouble on shorter games.  I went down to 5 minutes after a couple months and I was pretty good on time after a couple games.  However, I felt limited in my ability to think through my options, my play was sloppier, so I went back to 10 minute time controls.

I read some one's advice on here for noobs to play 3 minute games with the idea you can play a ton of games in a short period of time, and get to see lots of patterns and stuff.  However, I kind of feel that playing sloppy-fast teaches you to play sloppy.  I would think I'd only move to shorter time controls when I get enough grasp of opening, middle and end game tactics that I can play faster without playing sloppy.  

This is the same way that classical musicians are taught -- you never play sloppy, you play as slow as you need to, to play without being sloppy, and then you only speed up when you can do so without becoming sloppy.  The notion is that playing faster and making mistakes will ingrain a pattern in you of making those mistakes.

Even in 10 minute games, I can see when I analyze them how I played "sloppier" than in games with 1-3 days per move, but I do enjoy quick games, so this sort of my own compromise between speed and slop.

Anyway, music is not chess, and maybe the analogy does not hold up.  Maybe I would learn faster just playing a ton of 3 minute games (or why stop there?  Maybe 1 minute games).  Is there any general consensus out there, based on real experience, as to whether lot of fast blitz games are the best way to initially improve your game?

Ken

Long games are way better for learning.

Based on my own experience, I learn much more from my OTB long games. I can learn a little from 15 10 Internet games if I analyze them afterwards.

You are right. Playing sloppy = practicing sloppy. So you are reinforcing bad play by playing bad chess at rapid time controls.

That said, you also won't get better at faster time controls if you exclusively avoid them. And when you get good enough at blitz/rapid time controls, and start building a true opening repertoire, you'll benefit from seeing a lot of responses to your repertoire, where it's particularly helpful. 

Blitz is terrible for proper endgame practice though. If you do reach an endgame in a 5-min game, it will be almost always with <1 min to play, so you lose all the critical decisionmaking required for true accurate endgame play in lieu of cheapo simplifications and pawn rushes that are instantly refuted if you had only than 10 sec to think per move.

I find that I improve faster and learn a lot more when I play long games. What I do is just avoid blitz and bullet altogether and play correspondence games where I can think for as long as I need to and come up with good plans and avoid most simple tactics. I use a database to analyze openings so I can learn to take advantage if my opponent makes a dubious move and understand why certain moves are not played at the top level. When I do play live I play with a minimum of 15 minutes per side.

Came here to say this.

Even Rapidplay OTB is good enough for learning (you have 30mins in total). But the point is that you need to put some effort in understanding the position. Once you do that, you

1) Train yourself to calculate longer lines.

2) Understand things about chess positions.

Then this newfound knowledge can be blurt out in blitz games.

But you can't build knowledge and skills from blitz. You'll just be making the same mistakes over and over again. Your rating might improve if you acquire better time management for instance, but you won't improve your understanding of chess.

I would really like to see if somebody thinks otherwise, i.e. if somebody here has improved (the real chess understanding) just by playing blitz.

I played thousands of blitz games on here (admittedly not taking them seriously) and I don't think I've ever improved at all. If I go to a OTB tournament then I learn stuff.

The players who have improved playing blitz are too busy playing blitz. It didn't seem to hurt bobby fisher's chess. It seems that people have very strong opinions on this, but no real evidence that one time control is better than another for learning. 

That being said, there seem to be a lot of players that play blitz all the time and seem to plateau at that level.. I think those players would surely improve playing slower games.