After signing up at the Internet Chess Club (ICC) I decided to give blitz chess a try. As I started playing chess nearly a year ago, I spend a vast amount of time reading (nearly) everything I found on the web about learning to play chess. Most articles suggest that playing fast chess games does not help you to become a better chess player and some even state that it may be harmful. Therefore, I played mainly correspondence chess at ChessWorld and signed up at ICC two months ago with the intend to only play slow games. During my first slow games at ICC I realized that in most cases I still lose due to very basic tactical mistakes, even though I have been practicing tactics almost every single day since I started playing chess 10 months ago. This still happens to me even in correspondence chess games, although the opportunity to check your moves for blunders before clicking the "confirm" button helps there.

This insight is not new for me (see previous posts such as "Blunder day - cheap pieces for all!" and "Board vision errors: why did I make this move?"). A couple of weeks ago, I decided to go back to the basics and read Dan Heisman's book "Everyone's Second Chess Book". The book gave me two important pieces of information: 1) every beginner seems to be plagued with this kind of problems; and 2) the only cure seems to be playing many games. The problem for me is that it is hard to play many (live) games if you have trouble finding big enough time slots in your schedule. I can always find a few minutes during the day to make a move in one of my correspondence chess games but to find more than a block of more than 1 hour to play a reasonable slow game is a different thing. Therefore, I decided to give playing faster games a try. In addition, I have to admit that I was curious about blitz chess. After all, most people playing online seem to play blitz. There must be a reason for this.

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