Whats better: Quick thinker, or smart slow player?

What do you think?  What is a good chess player?  A player that outminds another through blitz play, or someone that outwits another with correspondence play?  This is a two way discussion, some are quick reacting thinkers others perform well with time on their side?  Therefore, what is the answer to the battle of the minds???

a slow player that thinks quickly

a smart player that moves thinkly

a think smartly that plays quickly

I think that covers it.

I don't think either is "better" than the other, but my own preferance is to play long, well thought out games.  or, as well thought out as I can make it.

I wonder if there is a way to set up a tournament with different time controls, one side has 5 mins, the other has 45mins?

In the end, the one who plays better chess. I can't see a measure of strength other than that.

Are we playing normal or blitz here?

Well, it depends on which type of chess they're playing at the time, doesn't it. If the game is blitz, the quick thinker has the advantage; if the game is correspondence, the deliberate, patient guy has the advantage. Which is really just another way of saying that they're apples and oranges.

I have a younger friend who beats me in OTB almost every time. He's better than I am at envisioning the position 20 plies deep. But when we play CC, he loses that advantage because I get to move the pieces around on an analysis board. Also, he'll have many CC games going at once, whereas I'm quite content to have very few, so I have more time to spend analyzing any given position.

These types of chess are as different from each other as baseball and softball.

 analysis board? isn't that cheating?

outwitting some other goose is niether here nor there. What is important is getting to the bottom of a chess position, understanding it as best you can. I believe this can be better achieved with slow play (myself, I enjoy fast play!).

Well, it is also the ability to identify good opportunities, and play them quickly.

If you are good at blitz, it would not be a wonder for you to perform on  a time-limited OTB game. In the end, the natural thinker wins.

Unless we are talking about CC where you get tonnes of time, a player with the natural ability to identify good moves (whether patterns or positions) will have a good advantage.

i read an article by i believe andy solstice, that said in it something about the law of diminishing tactical awareness...the gist of it was that if you dont see a combiation or a tactic in the first few assessments of a position then the opportunity TO see the tactics diminishes the longer you think...or long think, bad think...but there are exceptions...i agree that its appels and oranges...CC chess favors the longer thinkers, blitz favors instinctive quick thikers, long OTB games need both types.

Not in CC. Analysis boards have always been a part of CC--even when moves were transmitted by ships at sea. You may have noticed that Chess.com's CC has a built-in analysis board, which it wouldn't have if that were cheating.

You know, it's a good idea to know the rules, else you're giving away an advantage to your opponent right there. There are special subgroups here--like the CoT groups--that have their own special rules in games amongst themselves, but special rules don't apply unless there's a prior agreement between the two players.

Personally, I prefer correspondence and slow games.

On the other hand, if you have a good knowledge of tactics, and good board vision, I think one can excel at both.  In fact, one Grandmaster (and I can't remember who) said that if you're good at slow chess, you can excel at blitz too.

But in my case, too often, blitz turns into "gotcha" chess.  I just don't care for it.

Your 100% right. You get better at blitz because of repitition. When you see the same moves over and over you react. Repitition, repitition, repitition. Most good Blitz players cannot play long games. When they play long games, they try to install the same moves as they would in their blitz games but when their opponent moves a peice they would never have seen in a blitz game then they are stunned. Not all blitz players are like that but most are. My blitz playing sucks, i cant think that fast. The opening is no problem, the middle game is where blitz players win.

CC has helped me become a better player at recognizing different repetitions in openings and my guess is that it will eventually make me a better blitz player.  It seems to me that there is about a 200 pt. differential with CC to long live chess.  I am currently in the low 1600's with CC, and I would expect to be roughly a mid 1300 player in long games and would be my OTB ranking roughly.  I don't play a lot of live anymore, so my games are changing 30-40 pts at a time, which doesn't give me a "solid" idea of where I'm at.

Some say that rankings and ratings don't really matter and I can agree on that.  But to me it's fun because it makes each game you play is competitive and rewards you when you win. 

Dear friends,

you must bear in mind that chess it's a very very old game and for many centuries it was played without any time control both here in europe as well as in the meaddle east. Even some very important chess tournaments in London and Paris still at the beginning of XX century had no fixed time at all.

So....  as a game it was not really intended to be played in a fixed time I guess, this is something new in chess.....

Today we live in a busy and different enviroment but maybe chess (among many other things) can also teach us how to slow down a little and have a different perspective of life/time/space....  ace ace ace ace ace   ;-)

If you aren't thorough, you have a good chance of getting getting a beat down if you don't have a routine. 

Speed chess is the son of regular chess.  There can't be any other way.  If one sucks at longer games he will definitely suck at speed chess, except when he gets lucky.   Speed chess is a lot of fun though.... 

Strong quick tactical ability invariably goes hand-in-hand with overall playing strength. That said, here are three types of players who need not have strong quick tactical ability.

1. Blitz specialists
2. Correspondence specialists
3. Theoreticians

The blitz specialist knows one game, probably 5 min chess, and knows it well. They are excellent at clock management. Often they may get into an inferior position out of the opening, but they know how to use their time to their advantage. They are only strong tactically in the context of the 5 min game, and the type of coffeehouse chess they play would not hold up in a longer time control OTB tournament game.

The correspondence specialist relies too heavily on the crutches of correspondence chess. There is the various opening DBs, analysis on a physical board or an electronic equivalent such as the chess.com analysis board, and the concept of writing down analysis lines for later retrieval. When you can let the position marinate overnight (and often it's basically the same position for weeks at a time), you lose some of the underlying immediacy of the requirement of strong tactical ability.

Theoreticians spend a lot of time analyzing openings, or middlegames, to find the core of the position. In so doing, they are also deprived of the situations which require immediate tactical awareness. Like the correspondence specialist, they can take often times awhile to think about the position.