I always thought that speed chess could be damaging in some respects because you make more mistakes and are not planning strategies and thinking in the correct way as much when playing at speed. When playing ten minute games recently however, I felt I was starting to 'see the board' better. Do you think speed chess is good training in this respect?
Originally posted by stofferFrom my experience playing blitz games on the Free Internet Chess Server, I would have to say that playing faster had seriously damaged my chess-playing ability; may ratings took a nose dive.
I always thought that speed chess could be damaging in some respects because you make more mistakes and are not planning strategies and thinking in the correct way as much when playing at speed. When playing ten minute games recently however, I felt I was starting to 'see the board' better. Do you think speed chess is good training in this respect?
I have found that taking more time per move, such as in RHP games, I am playing much better chess.
Moral of the story: don't play too much speed chess. Like potato chips, they may taste good, but if you play too many fast games, you will become fat and lazy. 😀
-Ray.
it all depends on how you play the fast games
I use blitz chess mainly to try out new openings that i have little knowledge of, after a lot of blitz in an opening you start noticing the ideas and traps etc within the opening and you can decide if you like the opening or not
if not, move onto another one
if you like it
read some more on it and bring it into your long game play.
If you play slow games as you would a speed game then you will play badly and you'll think speed chess has hurt you.
But if you really use the extra time in those slow games I think you'll find you can really look into many variations because you have adapted to doing faster analysis.
i thought playing fast would help my game initially because it would force me to think faster. it did to some extent and i found i did see more in a shorter period of time. i could see deeply in single variations well, but not the alternatives. this was when i played on FICS.
i found though that i wasn't improving and on longer games with better players, i wasn't using my time well - sort of going around in circles and tnen making a move out of frustration. i also developed the absurd attitude of trying to recoop my ever-so-important rating everytime i lost to someone with a lower ranking, by playing luigibot (a weak computer program that was practically guaranteed to commit a ridiculous blunder after about 20 moves) a few times. i also found that i was pushing the pieces after several games without even thinking about the moves - and it felt good, till you realized you had messed everything up.
anyway, i finally came to my senses and figured that it was time to play chess rather than play games so i came to rhp and rarely go to FICS. you can really get into a game during correspondence chess.
it is a little like being absorbed in an exciting novel versus reading the headlines in a newspaper. the latter makes you think you know a lot, but then you find out that what you have learned is transitory and that you really didn't want to know this stuff after all.
playing fast can be fun and will improve certain aspects of one's game i think, but i much prefer the novel 🙂
in friendship,
prad
several GM's have said that for beginning chess players blitz chess is bad and i agree. learning the correct mental thought process (such as candidate moves, evaluating positions, etc) is more important to develop than anything else imho. i still get lazy when it comes to choosing a move and playing blitz doesn't help.