What's best to learn? Blitz or long games?

GM David Bronstein said, "Never play at less than game/15."  His reasoning was you need at least 5 minutes for the opening, 5 for the middlegame, and 5 for the ending.

When I was first learning openings, my friends and I used 5 minute games to study the openings.  We would analyze the games after they were over, up until the point where they became invalid (i.e., mate was overlooked, or a Queen was hanging, etc.)  For any other use than that, 5 minute (or less) games are just cotton candy--it may taste sweet, but it has no nutritional value.

Your best is to use three phase approach to improvement--read books, analyze your games (especially your losses), and play.  Give about an hour per week each to the first two, and whenever you feel like for the last.  But remember that a steady diet of speed chess leads to shallow analysis.  Get good at slow chess first--like a muscian, learn the scales first, then work on your speed.  But you need to get good first.

Blitz is NOT good for learning... it does allow you to practice memorized openings, but you've got to have memorized them in the first place. It allows you to test your tactical vision. It does perhaps train you to focus and think clearly under pressure. But it also actually has some real drawbacks. I think it encourages players to be impatient and to not think as deeply as they need to. A steady diet of Blitz IMHO can make ordinary chess players _worse_.

Slow chess played intently is good.  Analyzing your slow chess games after you've played them is also very good to do.

Blitz is nood good for learning..May be true. I don't know if the feeling of a position can be learned or earned, there may be a difference.

But i would never, ever, play some opening without having tried it in blitz.Blitz really helps to get a feeling for positions if you play new openings, so it helps to learn new openings i think.

I think it's a matter of taste. I don't think that either of both ways to play chess could be bad for you..Maybe if you always play blitz, the speed of your normal chess , yeah, but it also helps to make decisions faster, we could call this sharpened instincts. Also, normally playing much blitz helps for tactics, i think, and mostly it let's you play more courageous (dunno, is this the word?), because you have a feeling that there's nothing to lose, not even some rating points...

At least thats what I think..I played nearly only blitz some time ago but swichted to "long" chess, and I think that that time helped me in quite some situations.

I would subscribe under every word!

long games because they're more difficult to win and more skill and knowledge of the game is required.

hahaa it depends in your thinking skills i guess

The question that players just don't want to face is how good do you expect to become? At every moment in chess history we had poor players, medium players, good players, experts and masters. Ask yourself why was this so? Did not all these players want to become masters? The same thing will apply to any human endeavour just look at the facts do not be deceived by hype. We cannot all be Maradona or Steve Davis, or Kasparov.

In theory it should be similar to slow chess, since you have plenty of time to think.

However, chess.com seems to encourage quickly getting 20+ games at the same time (at least that's what I end up doing within a couple of days). It's far too easy to get into a mode where you come to a position you vaguely remember, just play the first reasonable move you see, and go to the next game. That may be even worse than blitz.

So, do you actually spend five minutes per move? Do you keep notes? Do you keep interest during the entire game? Then turn based is good.

My favorite time control in internet chess is 15-30 minutes - this way a game doesn't take forever, it's no problem to wait for the win with a disconnected opponent, and I feel it's still good for chess skill as it's not all about time like in blitz or even bullet (where the player with more time can go into lost endgames that the other player with less time just can't play out). Important: Analyze your recorded long games (best is with a stronger player and his explanations, but at least go through them with the computer and look for obvious tactical blunders that you and your opponent might have missed).

I do play blitz and bullet too - but mostly because in my club everyone plays blitz OTB and it feels bad to always lose, so I want to get better there too :)

You play long games, you learn something. You play blitz, you also learn something. It is just that, what you learn from playing blitz are mostly non-technical and difficult to explain (like building pattern recognition for example).

It is wrong to say that playing blitz will worsen your chess playing skill. Ability to think fast itself is already a skill. You just need some time to adapt with different time control.

To me it is not about which one is more important. The most important thing is to know which aspect (or weakness) that I want to learn  (or fix, especially the weakest link). If it is better be fixed through playing blitz then be it.

Instead of asking "which one is best, slow or blitz" it is better to ask what is our weakest link, what aspect that if we fix will effectively improve our overall performance. After that can be answered then ask how (in what way) that weakness should be fixed.

If your blitz skill is already above 2100, does your positional understanding (and there are many aspects also here) match with that rating? This is for sure something that you don't learn during playing blitz. If it does not then your performance (winning probability) may be low because many times you have to meet with positional player that can stir the game into purely positional.