Why Tea is a Miracle Beverage for Playing Blitz

People often ask me: “What do you drink when you play blitz?” or something along those lines.
And the assumption is always the same: that I’m basically hooked up to a Costa Coffee IV drip, running on espresso shots, jittering through blitz games at 3 AM with coffee being the only thing that keeps me awake.
But here’s the thing: I don’t.
In fact, I tend to stay away from coffee entirely when I play.
Instead, I drink tea.
And honestly? It feels like a miracle beverage for blitz. And not because it contains some secret chemical compound only monks know about. No, it’s just because tea does exactly what blitz wants from you. But let's break it down.

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Coffee vs. Tea: The Duel

Coffee is good for sprints. It's great if you need to wake up at 7 AM to shovel in some breakfast and rush into a morning game, but it’s not so great when you’re staring at a complex middlegame position with 2 minutes on the clock.
Coffee makes you jittery and impulsive, and blitz is already quite notorious for being a game where your fingers move faster than your thoughts — I think you can now see how this can be a deadly combination together with coffee. Coffee turns you into the guy who launches an attack that “seems to work”, only to realize three moves later that it doesn’t.
Tea, on the other hand, wakes you up just enough to keep your eyelids from closing, like a gentle nudge. Tea-drinking players more often than not have thoughts like: “Alright. Breathe. Look at the board. What’s really going on here?”

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The Quiet Mind

Blitz isn’t about calculating like a supercomputer, it’s about finding that delicate balance between instinct and control. And control comes from calmness.
When I play with tea, my thoughts don’t blur together into one caffeine-drenched impulse, instead they line up. Moves appear with less panic involved. I don’t rush into unsound sacrifices just because they look dramatic.
And it’s not like I'm suggesting slowing down on the clock, it’s more about slowing down in the head. And tea seems to create just enough space for clarity.

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The Ritual

Of course, part of the magic isn’t chemical at all. It’s ritual.
Making tea before a blitz session forces me to pause to prepare it. To step into the game with intention rather than impulse. It reminds you: don’t just throw pieces around, actually think.
That ritual is what matters. In fact, it might matter more than the beverage itself.

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Final Sip

So as you can see, no, you don’t need to be caffeinated out of your mind, chain-drinking americanos to play good blitz. You don’t need to live in coffee shops to hit a new rating record.
Sometimes all you need is tea.
Calm. Focus. Clarity.
That's what you need for successful blitzing. Not the chaos of coffee-fueled hallucinations. Definitely not.