Is blitz chess good for our chess?

Is playing a lot of blitz good for chess improvement?
This is a question that often comes up in chess circles, and while there’s no definitive answer, my view is that for most people — it’s not particularly effective. It’s tempting to look at huge talents like Firouzja, Nihal Sarin, or Hikaru Nakamura, who play blitz constantly while still improving their OTB classical ratings, and wonder why the average club player doesn't see the same gains after grinding dozens of 3+0 games a day.
After reflecting on this quite a bit, I’ve come to a few conclusions about why blitz can be a valuable tool — but only under specific conditions.

Pattern recognition

The first of which touches upon pattern recognition - playing hundreds of online blitz games per week exposes a player to millions of different positions, but it all depends on what the player "does" with these positions, consciously and unconsciously, this further separates my argument into two "small" topics - conscious and unconscious learning.

The former, simply put is about analyzing the blitz games after a session, which I assume the mentioned talents do all the time, as do most strong players I know. The games themselves aren't serious, but there's always a chance to learn something. In this context, it can't be considered game analysis in the traditional sense since there is no thought process to analyse, instead we would go through the games with the engine, not even necessarily a very strong one, taking about 4-5 minutes per game and making some simple conclusions while going through like "oh, that's a nice move" or "ah, this move doesn't work because of this, of course".

The unconscious part of the equation is about our brains picking up on ideas that work and those which do not. The way I would explain this is that a well chess-trained brain constantly analyses ideas and makes quick and quite effective conclusions about positions during games, during analysis and during other times as well, picking up small ideas as it goes, realising in what circumstances one idea tends to work and when it doesn't, with every position slowly improving the pattern recognition of the chess player. These changes are almost insignificant to one's chess understanding when isolated, but when compounded over thousands of games and millions of positions, the improvement can be huge.

So who does this kind of work benefit the most? I think that logically it would be those who can absorb tactical and positional patterns the best, who may that be? Children! Or just in general young people, basically those, who have the most neuroplasticity. Since I'm not much of a neuroscientist, I asked chatgpt to give a quick overview of how age matters here.

Another reason young people tend to benefit more from training by playing and analyzing blitz is that they have more free time to spend. This training method only works effectively with enough volume. For example, to play and analyse 30 blitz games with a time control of 3+0, you would need at least 4 hours, which is quite a lot for someone who has other things to do. One more thing I would like to add that playing a lot of blitz and then analyzing is a good way to train your openings, especially if you have some kind of "feedback loop", like a ChessBase PGN or a chessable study or something similar which you can refer back to after every single blitz game that you have played and analysed. This way you can learn at least one or more moves per game in one of your openings, which, again, isn't much, but can compound greatly over many games.

Chess skills?

While blitz chess helps with improving pattern recognition, it doesn't really develop many other skills UNLESS the skills are already high enough to be shown with a very limited time control. Let me explain.

When playing a serious online blitz game, strong players treat it as any other chess game they would play - they use all of the tools at their disposal. Not only pattern recognition, but also calculation and effective time management. For example, if it's a "serious" blitz game, like one in Titled Tuesday (which is 3+1), you will rarely see a gm having more time in a lost position, or at least if he does, he will use this time to figure things out over the board to not get crushed (this may differ greatly in a 3+0 game).

If you've watched a Hikaru stream or any other very strong GM playing blitz, what will instantly strike you is the efficiency of thought. During a game, Hikaru will 90% of the time spit out variations, many of them, without much pause. The rest of the time he will be making lists of candidate moves and he will have a lot of different ideas in every position, using some calculation to work out what he thinks is the best in each case (of course, this is what chess is about, but doing this efficiently with such limited time is quite impressive). Rarely will you see him think for 20 seconds silently and say "hm, the d5 square is weak". All this simply means that he is very skilled at chess and he is able to calculate variations a lot more accurately and a lot more quickly than many other players, this makes his blitz games of very high quality, many of them can be more seriously analysed by us with the point of deepening our chess understanding, not just finding some new interesting patterns. If someone like Hikaru is able to use his actual skills in a 3+0 game, this means his skills are improving by doing so, gradually making him even more skilled.

This brings us to another group of players who can greatly benefit from training with blitz games - players that know how to play chess. At some point in one's development, a player needs to start learning about chess less and instead start training their chess. This happens when a player is already familiar with all of the basic principles of chess and can play it at quite a decent level in long time controls.

Of course, decent chess is hard to describe, but if there was a definition, I would definitely include 1) very rare 1-move blunders, 2) sensible piece development in the opening, 3) good understanding of strategic concepts like weak squares, open files, static and dynamic factors, 4) having some kind of stable opening repertoire, 5) knowing at least the basics of how to calculate - candidate moves, resistance, etc, of course the list doesn't have to be conclusive. Usually a player switches from learning to training at a level around 1700-2000 FIDE classical rating, so that would be the range at which I would advise experimenting with using blitz as a training tool, until then, I would advise learning all of the basic principles and starting to acquire the skills needed for decent chess at a longer time control and only then try to replicate them with a very limited time control, otherwise you may see a very low quality of play in your blitz games.

Conclusion

To conclude this article, I would say that training by using blitz games can be quite effective if done right and with maximum effort, it has also helped me personally quite a bit. In general I feel this method works best with young players who are already strong and don't have much to "learn", they can use blitz games to further develop the skills that they have already acquired. Of course, this doesn't mean that improving adults can't do this as well - the beauty with chess improvement is that there are so many ways to do it and to create a training plan that is perfect for you. In general, I wouldn't suggest playing blitz as a training method if you: 1) don't have a decent repertoire which you can repeatedly use in many games, 2) can't tell yourself at least 2-3 candidate moves in most positions in a few seconds, 3) can't calculate a couple short 2-3 move lines quickly if needed 4) feel that you don't yet have an understanding of the chess fundamentals.

If you wish to learn more about blitz chess and how it can help us improve, feel free to message me on lichess. If you wish to have a personal chess training plan which you can use to improve constantly, feel free to visit Chessodoro and claim your free game review video as well.