It is undeniable that there are many tempting distractions for the improving chess player in the modern era.
The latest Chessable course, Mittens, arguments on Twitter about whether the London System is amazing or not, and many would also argue blitz.
For a long time, I myself was someone who largely stayed away from blitz.
It wasn’t until I was around 16 or 17 years old that I had started to take blitz seriously, and play more of it.
Prior to this, I had been told that blitz was bad for me and that I should avoid playing it. I happily did so — because I was terrible at it, to say the least.
The Issue
However, now looking back in hindsight, I can see how this weakness of being poor at blitz was pervasive across many of my classical OTB games as well.
Namely speaking — my time management was dreadful.
Here is one example, from an OTB game I played in 2017 (rated around 2000 FIDE at the time).
My opponent had just played 11…c5 (which is a typical pawn sac for this line — though I did not know this at the time), which was outside of my prep, and I ended up spending 45 minutes on my next two moves.
Yes, 45 minutes.
In large part because I believed I should somehow be able to refute my opponent’s move, but that’s another story.
Needless to say, my next two moves did not magically refute Black’s position, and I later went onto lose the game.
Although hindsight is 20/20, and it was impossible to know during the game whether or not a refutation of my opponent’s idea existed, I do believe that having more experience with blitz would’ve helped avoid such a “blunder” with regards to my time-management.
In blitz you are forced into many situations where you have no choice but to make decisions that are quick and practical — which helps develop your intuition, but more on that soon.
I lacked a lot of practicality in my play and would often try to brute-force calculate my way through positions where that simply was not possible, and had to instead put greater trust in my intuition (which would’ve been a completely foreign concept to my 14 year old self).
The Two Main Benefits of Blitz
So with all that being said, and now having become a much stronger blitz player (though still nothing special, I must admit), I believe there are two areas of your game that blitz is amazing for: intuition, and openings.
Intuition
A common saying is that ‘chess is 99% tactics’, but recently I have come to believe that perhaps ‘chess is 99% intuition’.
I’ve already discussed this a bit in some other articles, such as ‘Reprogram Your Chess Brain: Materialism’, but the subconscious is an extremely powerful tool.
It governs more than 90% of our decision making in life, and likely in chess as well — and our intuition is largely composed of the infrastructure of information that is stored in our subconscious.
In blitz especially, you have to train your ability to make good decisions intuitively — since trying to calculate everything with such little time is likely a losing strategy.
Of course, you have to actually make sure you analyze your games afterwards though. Otherwise you could be building incorrect patterns into your intuition — which is what happens to many players, and is also why many coaches advise against blitz — but more on this later.
Essentially, I see every blitz game as a chance to test my intuition, and then calibrate accordingly.
Openings
The other huge benefit of blitz is that it is one of the best (if not the best) way to improve your openings — especially in terms of understanding them.
Although it can be great to study annotated games and what not in your preferred openings, there is nothing quite like first-hand experience.
In particular if you are learning a new opening, it is mandatory (in my opinion) to at least play a dozen or so blitz games (for myself, it would be more like 100) in that opening before trying it out OTB.
Back when I was younger, I may have known a fair bit of theory, but I was extremely deficient in terms of actually being able to play out the middlegames, since most of my practice was just through OTB games. Even if you are reasonably active, and play something like ~50 games a year, that is likely not going to be anywhere near enough to build up enough confidence in these openings.
With blitz on the other hand, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to play on average 3 games a day, which over the course of the year amounts to 1095 games. This would be over 500 games with each colour.
Inevitably, you will be exposed to all sorts of new ideas, and gain experience in a much shorter time-frame than is possible with classical chess.
If you were to play the ~50 OTB games a year I mentioned above, it would take over 20 years to amass the same number of games.
Avoiding the Common Pitfalls
So while this all sounds great and all, there is the elephant in the room that needs to be addressed — which is that the majority of chess coaches and instructors online seem to advise against blitz, and here I am recommending it.
I believe this prejudice against blitz, however, largely stems from players not treating it seriously and falling into two common pitfalls.
A Brief Side-Tangent
Before discussing those pitfalls however, I want to make an important caveat.
I believe that players under 1500 should favour rapid or classical over blitz.
I have no evidence supporting this, but here is my reasoning: when you are at such a level, your intuition just isn’t very developed yet. Since one of the primary benefits of blitz is being able to test your intuition, this obviously isn’t an ideal combination.
At this level, one of the best things you can do to develop your intuition, is to think more slowly.
You must learn to walk before you can run, as they say.
Aside from that caveat, however, let us get back on topic.
Tilt
Personally, tilt is not something I have had to deal with in quite a while, and the reason I believe is quite simple.
I usually will schedule in 30-60 minutes to play 3-6 games of blitz, and then just stop once I reach the limit.
If you go in with no structured session, it is incredibly easy to just keep going — because you lost some game, or because you want your rating to cross some arbitrary threshold.
Your quality of play will likely suffer from this, and at this point blitz is definitely doing you more harm than it is good — as you are likely not analyzing your games, and are just further reinforcing all sorts of bad habits.
Not Analyzing
As I have alluded to multiple times throughout this article, analyzing your blitz games is crucial if you wish to get the most out of your blitz games.
Unless you are playing flawlessly game after game (which I can almost certainly guarantee you are not), you have mistakes in your games that you need to uncover.
At a bare minimum, check with the engine and database to see if there was an improvement in the opening. Ideally, you should also try and find one point in the middlegame/endgame which you didn’t play so well, and take note of that for future study.
For example, say you obtained a some closed strategic position in the French with White, where you struggled to crack Black’s position. Maybe the engine can’t give you all the answers to your questions, but at a later time you could study the French pawn structures from a book like ‘Chess Structures’ to refine that specific area of your game.
Engines
While I am not opposed to using engines for quickly scanning one’s blitz games (I almost always do this), I will make a cautionary note and say that the lower rated you are (especially U1500), the more careful you may want to be when using them.
At the very least, if you do use them, learn to distinguish between an engine criticizing (or liking) a move for tactical or strategic reasons.
If a move is tactically bad, the engine will typically give some narrow forced line leading to an advantage.
If a move is strategically bad, the engine will usually show multiple lines which lead to an advantage for the opponent.
A Final Note
Although this should be obvious, I want to finish off by saying that blitz should not be the only thing you do to improve your chess.
For most players, blitz and openings is all they do — and they never improve.
However, so long as blitz is incorporated as part of a more holistic study/training plan (and isn’t the plan itself), then I believe there are some serious benefits to be reaped from it.
Well explained here about Blitz habits as positive way and pitfalls. Going against the tide is often hard but worth learning (about playing Blitz vs not)
I have found Blitz useful in playing out my Openings I think I studied good enough but realized not deep enough.
Also few Blitz games go by bliss (just applying recenlty re-visioned positional play) but simple blunder happened eventually.
So it helped in positional understanding too.
A quick question here - what tools you use to summarise Blitz openings played in a timeframe and learn from them? There are many niche free tools there but it's pretty confusing.
Thank you
Hello -
I agree with everything said here, and I already play blitz in this ‘healthy’ way, as I’ve seen similar advice before.
One thing I am struggling with though is learning from blunders during game analysis. I see I made a blunder but I have no idea what to do about it. Do I just acknowledge it, or try to find some kind of pattern (not sure there is one)?
Blundering is not really that big of an issue for me, in OTB classical games I cannot remember the last time I blundered and in rapid only under time pressure.
Should I just accept that blunders will happen in blitz, leave them and focus on intuition and openings, which are working well from me?
I don’t care too much about my blitz results and blunders doesn’t frustrate me too much (as long as it’s not the cause of most losses), but it’s more about if it shows some kind of deeper issue.