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> The truth is, blitz chess is not only insanely fun but extremely good training to develop intuition for slow chess.

I find that actually quite controversial - correlation does not imply causation. The general sentiment within the community is that the causation works from the other side i.e being good at slow leads to being good at blitz.

Here are some quotes you might find interesting:

"Playing rapid chess, one can lose the habit of concentrating for several hours in serious chess. That is why, if a player has big aims, he should limit his rapidplay in favour of serious chess." – Vladimir Kramnik

"He who analyses blitz is stupid." – Rashid Nezhmetdinov

"Blitz chess kills your ideas." – Bobby Fischer

"To be honest, I consider [bullet chess] a bit moronic, and therefore I never play it." – Vladimir Kramnik

"I play way too much blitz chess. It rots the brain just as surely as alcohol." – Nigel Short

"Blitz is simply a waste of time." – Vladimir Malakhov

I will refute your list of quotes by (again) pointing to the results of the world championships, just concluded.

The world crown was lost because Fabiano cracked under time pressure and lost a position in Game 1 of tiebreaks that he easily could have drawn in classical chess.

Skill in blitz chess does translate to classical, people.

It's not just about developing intuition. It's training your mind to see clearly under non-optimal situations, like when you are exhausted or, say, drunk. Not that you would ever play a serious game of chess while drunk, but still.

Being good at slow 100% does NOT lead to being good at blitz. I mean, yes, a grandmaster will beat a noob at blitz, but that's obvious.

I know what I'm talking about. I am a lowly national master who "punches above my weight" by regularly beating strong IMs and GMs at blitz and bullet.

@whatismindgam3 on LiChess, feel free to add me there or challenge me if you want to put my theories to the test.

I know nothing about chess, but part of your argument in both this post and the one before seems to be "I'm right because my ranking is higher than average". That's a bad way to convince people in general (it relies on appeal to authority, a type of logical fallacy), but since you're insistent on using it, the people quoted above are much stronger authorities and appear to hold the opposite view.

Is there a reason why you’re not calling out the parent comment on appeal to authority? Because that was the thrust of his entire argument.

It’s not just me who feels that way about blitz though. Look at guys like Hikaru Nakamura or Daniel Naroditsky. For every grandmaster who thinks blitz is useless, I can find one who thinks the opposite.

Ultimately the only real way to test theories is to get in and try it on yourself. Would you like to learn how to improve your chess? Are you open to a new way of doing it accelerated by technology? If so, I might be able to help. If not, no worries. There are plenty of other coaches or software tools out there.

“The best blitz players are the best slow players.” — Dan Heisman

Bobby Fischer played a lot of Blitz, notably:

* 1958 trip to Moscow chess club he took on all comers, including Petrosian in blitz: https://nezhmet.wordpress.com/2010/03/18/the-fabulous-50s-fi...

* 1962 Stockholm, Geller pulls a trick on Fischer suggesting he play his "unknown" compatriot when Fischer challenged him to blitz. The unknown was Leonid Stein, a legendary blitz player, but largely unknown outside of the USSR: http://www.thechessdrum.net/blog/2012/03/16/bobbys-blitz-che...

* 1970 Herceg Novi Blitz tournament, held very soon after The World vs USSR match. Winner was a certain Bobby Fischer: https://www.365chess.com/tournaments/Herceg_Novi_blitz_1970

This is definitely legit, and I think there is great potential in developing an online chess server/interface that is leagues and leagues above what we currently have. Not to mention the potential of having top GM's involved, and harnessing the addictive potential of bullet/blitz :)

I'm involved in early beta-testing for mindgam3's interface, and can vouch for its legitimacy and potential. See my comment to the main post for more explanation.

-GM Daniel Naroditsky

Thanks for your insights!

As someone who enjoys blitz much more than classical chess and would like to get better at it, your interface sounds interesting. I'm only ~1,800 in blitz on Lichess, but I'd be curious to beta test it or take lessons.

Would love to get you involved! Please feel free to reach out for lessons or beta testing, my contact info is in my profile.

Emailed, thanks!

I'm a competitive Scrabble player, and to a lot of extent I agree with the development of intuition from blitz games. I probably played tens of thousands of 3-minute and fewer games online and although I am normally a very slow player in person, normally using up almost all of my time, playing blitz did and does help with play-finding, getting an intuition for when to play defense/offense, rapid anagramming, etc.

I disagree so strongly. At some point in my life, I had distorted my thought process heavily by fast chess. I in particular played it like Tal would. The element of surprise plays a major factor.

I was never as good as you in chess. My best game ever with normal time constraints was a tie against a 2400, and my regular games are around 2000. But it was only a hobby.

What is troubling about chess in general is that it cannot be truly learnt. As computers have shown. With that in mind, let's also assume that intution plays a role. The classical offers the second best way of determining who has got it right. Fast chess kills your intuition as it offers incentives to play the more wrong game that your opponent might blunder to. When I play normal chess, I play in a way that is safe up to somewhere between 5 to 7 moves depth, at my best days. Magnus has more depth obviously. So if his opponents play for the win, they will lose. And under time control, he has a better full view of the board, so plays faster and that's all as much I can tell. But if his opponent has an different, perhaps intuitive, style, which I have no understanding of, he will lose. The key point being, that the move that is the best up to depth 7, can be the move that you could see how it loses you the game if you had more depth.

To my main concern about your comment, playing fast, particular bullet and blitz, indeed damages your right intuition if there is any. And if the person is anything like me, it might bleed into other aspects of their life, with consequences.

My advice to anyone who plays fast games and has a sharp and computing mind, is to spend time at a creative activity, such as writing, some sciences, and put chess aside for a year. Develop your creative skills, and then you'll notice the negative impact of bullet and blitz (With all due respect to your skills, the terms bullet and blitz makes me feel a turmoil now), which I consider to be quite serious.

The shortest time control I play is 10+0 and I feel that at my very average level, I don't learn anything from it (especially if I get on a discouraging losing streak). These days, 15+15 is what I try to stick to on Lichess so that's my preferred control (still considered fast by OTB standards).

With that out of the way, I suspect that the difference between bullet and classical people is probably like the difference between a sprinter and a marathon runner.

In my other spare time, I like to ride bicycles. Everyone who doesn't do it thinks it's a dangerous thing - but the way I ride isn't the way that most people think I ride. I prefer the slow, cautious, zen and analytical approach compared to the "intuitive" fast, mad rush that most people will be familiar with when they think "cyclist". I can go fast when required as I have developed and applied my own theory for it, but most of the time I prefer to just take it easy. So I see some parallels there - horses for courses.

I don't really buy the idea that there's such a thing as intuition. Intuition to me merely means that someone who apparently demonstrates it cannot understand how to explain their intuition (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/intuition). Many seem to be equating it to a higher form of intelligence but I don't buy that that is the case.

I daresay that Fabiano Caruana is probably pretty good at classical now and can perhaps afford to practise shorter controls a lot more. He's actually not bad at it, but has had inconsistent results in the past. But who knows - in 2020 we might be seeing a lot less Rossolimo and Petrov.

My aspirations for Chess are pretty low these days (my estimated ELO max was around a mere 1500 over a decade ago when I played regularly..) but I'm curious how your web interface actually works to improve play and whether it would translate to other games. I've heard conflicting advice about the value of blitz games for Go as well, though the strongest person I've played in person (5dan amateur chinese) thought that I should think carefully about each move and take the time to do it, rather than bust out a bunch of games playing by intuition. Do you think your scheme for improving at rapid Chess would apply to Go's full 19x19 game?

I barely know the rules of Go, but I have great respect for the game and I believe it would apply there as well. The interface is based on the fact that chess is primarily a game of visual pattern recognition. Tactics like forks and pins, positional concepts like isolated pawns and weak squares, these are captured and processed visually. Getting good at chess is as much about learning how to literally see the patterns as it is about calculating ability.

To your other point, intuition is never going to replace deep calculation for slower games. But the ability to process visual patterns still aids with the deep thinking aspect. You can perceive more subtle patterns and add them visually while thinking carefully about each move.

Ah, so is the interface mainly to help point out the common patterns (especially if you missed them) during review? Or during play itself? Go has its patterns too, so you might be right that it would apply well there.

Both afterwards (training mode) and during (training wheels mode). Heck, this software might even allow me to attempt learning go, which feels like a herculean task for my no-longer-youthful synapses.

I've actually seen this too and will be helping with the tech side a little -- it's a great way to find my problem areas. I'm an amateur myself trying to improve ag blitz -- Lichess handle @tchang1997

> The truth is, blitz chess is not only insanely fun but extremely good training to develop intuition for slow chess. In case anyone has doubts about whether it is valuable, we just saw a world championship title awarded based on rapid

My opinion doesn't carry much as I haven't played competitively long enough, but I strongly agree with you here.

Just like in many things in life, constant time pressure helps build intuition; and in chess it helps us to trust our lines.

I felt like Fabiano was battling time in addition to Magnus.

Hey, I'm an FM and a full-stack web dev (though mostly frontend over the past few years). I'd love to be a beta tester. Any way I can contact you?

Sweet! I just added my contact info to my HN profile.

I am nowhere near you score, but I have heard many strong players stating that blitz is bad for you, and actually creates bad habits for classical.

Even today in the first rapid, there was a comment (from Svidler/Giri) that early on Caruana played a move too fast, as if he was already in blitz mode, when he should have thought a bit more and found a better move.

I suspect this effect depends on who you are. Within the sphere of casual chess players, playing a lot of blitz or rapid chess will make you a better chess player across the board, and any specialisation towards the format will likely be offset by the increase in general skill. For International Grandmaster quality chess players, they're already very good, so specialisation might be unhelpful. Cf. a similar effect in Google employees with programming competitions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9324209

> Cf. a similar effect in Google employees with programming competitions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9324209

Interesting point. Competitive coding has virtually nothing to do with real world software engineering. But, since it's still coding, you could learn a lot of bad habits from doing it that might carry over into the real world. Better to get into <competitive hobby> instead.

I think these IM/GMs are forgetting what it was like to play chess when they first started out. Nowadays, they see the board as, well, IM/GMs, and it's a different experience from someone who's just starting out.

I'm terrible, terrible at chess, but at least I don't hang my queen or do other truly stupid shit in longer time controls. You can't even really start to play chess for real until you stop just giving up pieces and I think as long as you're throwing games that hard, I dunno if rapid/blitz is the best place for you.

Or at least, that's what I think you might have heard when you say you've heard "blitz is bad for you". Once you stop doing the truly stupid shit, then you can start learning chess for real, and maybe then it's better to do rapid/blitz.

I know in Starcraft2 there was a component of grinding that pros would recommend, but you can't really grind if you don't know how to do screen hotkeys, for example.

I especially recommend blitz for beginners. It will mercilessly expose the gaping hole weaknesses in your game (i.e. hanging pieces). The way to improve at chess quickly is to find your blind spots quickly and train them.

Most people struggle to get good at chess because they are too afraid to lose, and too afraid to actually do the "practice" part of playing which is to analyze your losses to identify which areas you need to train.

Grinding is not how you get better. Grinding can be fun, and can be a great way to blow off steam. Both of those are awesome reasons to play chess. But if you are serious about improving quickly, do what the pros do. Don't grind aimlessly. Play a lot, don't be afraid to lose, and do legit post-mortems to give you feedback on where you need to pay more attention.

I will agree that it can be a double-edged sword. Like anything medicinal, it can turn into a poison if used incorrectly.

Ultimately, though, what this world championship proves is that we need to get rid of the distinction between "classical" and "blitz". The "classical" world championship was just decided by a few games of rapid.

Fundamentally, the question is how to get good at "chess" - thinking fast and slow. Over-training at any one time control will weaken you in the others. But will increase your overall strength.

Some players (myself included, 2400 bullet and 2250 classical) probably need to spend more time training and playing classical than bullet. The vast majority of players I encounter are much weaker in blitz than in classical, including many IMs and GMs. For these people I would prescribe a few thousand games of bullet chess, fix 'em up right quick.

I'm reasonably comfortable (though on a much lower level than you) playing blitz, because at least time management is in my control. bughouse was much more problematic, because much of the time one has is often spent sitting for developments on the other board, so one is forced to play much of the game at super bullet speeds.

I sent you a mail three days ago about this with the subject line 'Testing chess website?'. I am hoping you will get back to me.

So sorry for the delay. I have been completely buried putting together some chess events. I will respond today with next steps. Thank you for your interest!

I understand. No hurries. Your tool does seem very intriguing though :)

Thanks for your patience... I got over 30 emails from HN folks, which is awesome but it's taking me slightly longer than expected to handle the volume. Will reach out to everyone before signing off the weekend, for real this time :-)

@mindgam3: I'll gladly beta test it, and if I find some time I might help you out on some code as well :) https://github.com/fractalf/contact_me

I'm an iOS dev and I would potentially be interested in contributing. I can email you later if you'd like (I see your email is in your profile).

Please do email me! We have a killer mobile app designed and a bunch of other tech pieces including ML/CV in good shape, but iOS is the one area where we are weakest at the moment.

I play 95% my online bullet on my phone and even rely on mobile for ChessBase and training prep, so nailing the mobile UX is critical to this thing being habit-forming enough to become a viable daily training tool.

Also curious about the this tool you're working on -- dev and chess player -- ping me.

How do I contact you? I added my contact info to my profile, feel free to reach out.

Sent you an email.

I’d be interested in beta testing this. Sounds great

Interested in testing, mailed you

I'm happy to help beta test.