We call it chess. But most days, it’s just a way to stop thinking.
After a rough day you just want to breathe out, log into Lichess and play a few blitz games. Pieces move almost automatically, premoves fire off as if you’d already calculated everything — but your brain is asleep. Mistakes? Who cares. The point is speed: faster and faster. Lose? Rematch. Win? New opponent. Flow, dopamine, adrenaline. Everything spins and roars — it feels like bliss.
Do that day after day and suddenly a week has gone. A month. A year. You’ve played a thousand games and your rating hasn’t budged. Understanding? Even less.
Then the question hits: “Why am I stuck?”
The answer is painfully obvious: bullet and blitz aren’t about growth. They’re about speed and habit. Real progress comes from hard choices — when you pick a move, know why you picked it, and own the result.
You can’t hide in classical chess. You can’t blame the clock or luck for a loss. The mistake is yours. You stand alone with the board, your head and your weaknesses.
Here the unpleasant part begins. To improve you must think. Not a shrug and
“rook there, I’ll deal with it later,”
but careful calculation:
“If I put my rook on d8, my opponent replies Nf5, my king gets exposed, and I’ll be defending the entire endgame.”
That kind of thinking hurts. Your brain protests, your ego moans. But that’s development.
Blitz is convenient. Fast and noisy, like endless scrolling. Everything flashes and disappears. Lose — rematch. Win — onto the next. In the end you’re left with emptiness and the sense that time has leaked away.
Chess isn’t an escape. It’s a mirror. It shows where you’re lazy, where you hide, where you’re afraid to dig deeper. The real struggle doesn’t start with the clock; it begins the moment you decide,
“Fine — I’ll sit down and actually think” — and then you do.
— Written by Ruslan Barseghyan, coordinator of the Chess Club at Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University and main organizer of the Interuniversity Team Battles.
