Firstly, you need a few openings that you know well for black and white. Secondly, you need to play these positions over and over again, this way it gets you familliar with the kind of play required to win those games. Some openings are quite sharp and tactical (these tend to be ideal for blitz if you are good with them as you can often end the game with a single shot) other openings tend to be more about manouvering your pieces and picking on small weaknesses in your opponants pawn structures (less ideal for blitz as you quite often find that the point at which you have an advantage is when there are only a few seconds left to try and win the game).
Whichever one you choose, try and play it as often as possible and learn to play the moves out of instinct rather then thinking about them.
That is the first step to becoming good at blitz.
Originally posted by freightdog37Practice, practice, and more practice is probably the best advice I can give you, considering you haven't given an example of your games or your thoughts on why you might be performing poorly.
Does anyone have any advice on playing blitz. Every time I play I get my butt handed to me. It seems like the only way I can win is to play with no time limits.
If you're losing on time, I can also advise you to play at even shorter time limits than the blitz games you're playing now. So if you're playing 5 minute games, try training for them by playing 3 minute, or even 1 minute games. And play a lot of them. That's definitely helped me to improve in my own games.
Another bit of advice is to, as much as possible, play players who are stronger than you are. And don't let any (almost inevitable) feelings of frustration and disappointment get to you. You will lose, lose badly, and lose a lot in your road to improvement. But if you let those feelings get to you, give up, or start exclusively playing weak players, then these feelings will have become a great roadblock to improvement for you.
Another thing to watch out for is obsessing about your rating. IMO, you should be focusing on improvement, not ratings. My experience has been that ratings, especially online, can be wildly inaccurate anyway... and an obsession with them can definitely lead you to do things that are detrimental to your improvement (such as playing weaker opponents to boost your rating, or get unduly discouraged when your rating goes down or languages below what you'd like it to be). Focusing on improvement and persevering despite sometimes discouraging results is key, IMO.
Finally, I can recommend a surprisingly good little book called "Blitz Theory" by Jonathan Maxwell. The tips in it are very practical, and are geared to helping you improve at blitz.
I might disagree with the idea of playing strong opponents ALL the time, it can affect your style somewhat. I used to do it and found my game became extremely negative and I was'nt really trying to win but just to stop the other guy from making anything happen, try and stick to players around your own level but stretch out from time to time against a harder challenge - you notice the difference more when you go back against your own group if you have been up against a good player.
Originally posted by TyrannosauruschexThat's an interesting observation. My own experience playing against much stronger players was that I reacted to it by becoming much more aggressive. My regular style was far too passive to work against the stronger players, who would be upon me in no time while I wasted moves and tried to play defensively. However, when I started taking risks and played much more aggressively, sometimes it would lead to the stronger players having a much more difficult time defeating me (which they'd usually do anyway, no matter how I played, but at least against aggressive play they'd have to fight for the win).
I might disagree with the idea of playing strong opponents ALL the time, it can affect your style somewhat. I used to do it and found my game became extremely negative and I was'nt really trying to win but just to stop the other guy from making anything happen
...try and stick to players around your own level but stretch out from time to time against a harder challenge
Well, I didn't mean to imply that everyone, no matter how weak they are, should play exclusively against super grandmasters (though that might not be a bad way to improve either). I find that constantly playing against someone who far outclasses me eventually leads to more frustration and discouragement than I can handle. However, I do still believe that playing against stronger players is a better road to improvement than playing against weaker players, or even players at one's own level.
Exactly how much stronger one should pick one's opponents to be depends on the availability of strong opposition (most grandmasters are probably going to get pretty bored playing "patzers" all the time, and they generally want strong opponents to keep up their own playing strength), and on one's own tolerance for frustration and disappointment.
It's psychologically nice to stand at least some sort of a chance of winning your game, or at least causing your opponent some difficulty. And psychological factors such as this are an important part of keeping your interest in the game and, consequently, in putting enough effort to improve one's game.
If you're constantly feeling like the task before you is futile (which can easily happen when playing much stronger opponents), than this can be counter-productive. But I think if you play against opponents who are stronger (but not too much stronger) than you are, then those kinds of feelings are much more manageable, as you'd still stand a chance... and, in my oppinion, you'd learn much more from playing stronger opponents than weaker ones.