My Blitz Routine

How to avoid tilt, have more fun, and learn more

Aug 06, 2022

Blitz is often maligned as having no value or even harming your chess, but I think it’s one of the most powerful tools for chess improvement - if done right. In this post I go through the routine I use to harness blitz as a chess improvement tool.

A routine to eliminate tilt

Many players complain about going on tilt and playing far more blitz games than they wanted to. I’ve found that implementing two changes has also completely eliminated tilt from my blitz game.

Decide in advance how many games you’re going to play - and stick to it. This helps move blitz from a form of procrastination to something that I’m choosing to do because I like it. For the same reason, if you use a schedule, it can help to explicitly schedule a block for blitz. Having a hard cap on the number of games prevents you from going into a tilt spiral. Finally, making a plan and sticking to it gives you a small win, which can be very welcome if you lost your games that day.
Analyze every game. If you play the games and never look at them, you usually just end up going through the same motions over and over. It’s the review where the learning happens. Reviewing games also acts as another circuit breaker for tilt, by redirecting your focus away from winning the current game, towards what you can learn for future games. I usually play all my games for the day, import them into ChessBase, and analyze all of them, but if you’re really prone to tilt you might find it helpful to analyze each game immediately after you play it. This little breather can disrupt the momentum of tilt.

Some might say this sounds like a lot of tryharding for blitz. I wouldn’t necessarily disagree, but as far as I can tell most people who play blitz habitually without any structure don’t particularly enjoy it. On the Perpetual Chess podcast I heard Jeroen Bosch describe chess as a triangle with the three points being fun, winning, and improvement. Often you need to make tradeoffs between these three points, but for me implementing these two changes to my blitz routine has led to an improvement on all three. I have more fun, win more, and improve faster.

How to analyze blitz games

As I said, I like to play all my games for the day (usually four), then import them all into ChessBase and analyze all of them. The reason I import them into ChessBase is so that I can maintain a single file of all my blitz games from both Lichess and Chess.com. I find that a lot of the fruit of analysis comes from observing trends over multiple games, so it’s nice to have all my games in one place. I can quickly review all my games, the key moments, and the conclusions I drew. Having said that, it also works fine to analyze your games directly in Chess.com or Lichess. If you don’t have ChessBase you can use a Lichess study to save all your games in one place. The only downside is that it’s capped at 64 games, but at that point you can just create a new one. At the end of the day the choice of software isn’t that important, what matters is that you analyze the games one way or another.

I like to follow the OBIT method - Openings, Blunders, Interesting, Takeaway - for reviewing my blitz games. You can remember it as writing an obituary for the game.

Openings. I always review the opening and update my files as necessary. I like to update my opening file to the first move I would have played differently. This means there is not much work to do for any individual game, but if you stick with a consistent repertoire and iterate on it every game, you can improve your openings very quickly.
Blunders. I always review the blunders because for the most part these are the moves that decide the outcome of the game. In particular, I’m looking for any common theme that ties many of my blunders together. Am I failing to consider my opponent’s idea? Not calculating forcing moves? If there’s something that’s causing me to blunder repeatedly I need to address it.
Interesting. I try to always examine at least one additional moment from the game I found interesting. Often, this is a position where I got stuck and had no idea what to do. By this point I’m pretty attuned to these positions so I usually remember them, but if you’re unsure of which position to look at, one strategy is to look at the clock times. Any position where you spent an unusually long time thinking is probably one where you were confused, so those are good positions to examine.
Takeaway. At the end of each game after the last move I write my single biggest takeaway from the game. This is also helpful for identifying recurring patterns in my games.

Here’s an example of the OBIT process in action, reviewing this game.

Opening

I’ve been playing around with the King’s Indian Attack as White. Here my opponent played h5, a move not in my notes, and I responded with Bg5 to pin the knight and discourage h4. It turns out that h4 is not a real threat at all and it would be stronger to play c3 to prepare d4 immediately (“An attack on the wing is best met with a counterattack in the center.”) That goes into the file along with some reminders.

As you can see, my KIA file is still quite sparse. I’m using Kamil Plichta’s KIA course on Chessable and I haven’t gotten around to entering most of the lines into my own file yet. It would be a good exercise for me to make my own file from memory.

Blunders

Here I played f3 trying to break up Black’s kingside pawns, but if they had played gxf3 I wouldn’t have been able to take on h3 because of Rh8#. Fortunately my opponent also missed that, but when your opponent’s most obvious move leads to a disaster for you it’s a sure sign you’re not considering their moves seriously enough.

Interesting

In this position I got stuck because I knew I wanted to avoid a queen trade on positional grounds: my king is safer and the minor pieces are more powerful in a middlegame. But I couldn’t figure out a good square to move my queen. I had a blind spot for the centralizing move Qd5 because Black’s knight is “attacking” that square (only not, because of the pin).

Takeaway

My takeaway from this game was to slow down and calculate precisely when I have an opportunity to put the game away.

Here I played d4 winning a piece because of the threat of a pawn fork with d5, but Black stayed in the game because of the resource Nxe4 on a later move. Had I first exchanged that knight with Bxf6, I would have gotten the piece under more favorable circumstances and probably won quickly. I didn’t spend enough time figuring this out, given that it’s clearly a critical position and I’m on the verge of winning.