Blitz Chess Introduction
Many of the World Champions were excellent blitz players. Fischer and Kasparov for example were very strong at blitz.
Recently the FIDE world championship featured a number of blitz games, which proved popular for spectators. For example on the ICC, hundreds of people came to watch and kibitz the blitz games which were being relayed live.
Index
Is blitz chess good for your "normal" long game?!
Is blitz chess bad for your "normal" long game?!
Great blitz players
Fischer vs Kasparov in blitz
Is blitz chess good for your "normal" long game?!
Some players are of the opinion that blitz can be good for getting a "feel" for a particular opening. One can become familiar with some of the motifs which are resident in that opening. An example of a player that has cited blitz chess in a famous annotation was Fischer.
In the game Fischer vs Larsen annotated in Bobby Fischer My 60 Memorable Games, Fischer writes in the annotation of his 16th move B-N3! :-
"He wont get a second chance to snap off the Bishop! Now I felt the game was in the bag if I didn't botch it. I'd won dozens of skittles games in analogous positions and had it down to a science to pry open the KR-file, sac, sac ... mate !"
The great Fischer was not renound among other grandmasters apparently for being the
best blitz player in the world. However Fischer shocked everyone by winning a blitz
tournament convincingly in which the top grandmasters of the time played in.
Is blitz chess bad for your "normal" long game?!
Blitz chess encourages you to play exciting chess, which may be unsound but put your opponent under great pressure. Blitz chess does not require great time management skills because you are basically playing all your moves rapidly to avoid running out of time!
In long games, there are "critical climax" positions which requires a long think. Being able to spot this "critical position" and spending time playing the right move is very important. In general, being able to effectively manage your time resources in a long game, is not a skill which is appropriate and therefore not practiced in blitz chess.
Drawing conclusions from blitz games and then applying those conclusions to long games
is sometimes very risky. The opponent may not have found very accurate moves to a
particular idea, and that idea might be fundamentally unsound therefore.
There is evidence that the following players are among the greatest blitz players of all time:-
Fischer won the blitz tournament at Herceg Novi Yugoslavia that included Tal, Korchnoi, Petrosian. He scored 19 points out of a possible 22, Tal took second place with 14.5.
Fischer 19
Tal, Korchnoi 14
Petrosian, Bronstein 13
Hort 12
There was a fascinating thread in the rec.games.chess.newsgroup on this topic.
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