8 Comments

Lichess4545.com league has a sub-league called Infinite Quest -- it's matches with four 15+10 games weekly. And it goes forever, with internal rankings.

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Hey this sounds great, but I can't find it on their website.

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You have to be inside via Lonewolf or 4545 first, then you can join that one.

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Playing Bullet is really fun but ruins my Rapid ans Classical chess.

There is something to neural pathways being reinforced in terms of time preference for making a move. If you play a lot of Bullet and Blitz then it will be more difficult to analyze more in depth. Sort of like reading Twitter vs reading books. Attention span.

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I think blitz for openings is to fast for amateurs but ok. for Masters and GMs. The latter memorize variations up to 20/25 moves so already can play in auto-pilot almost half of the game. Amateurs we know some basic variations of our openings up to 8/10 moves and we have to figure out the rest studying many GM games and getting patterns of the typical plans in a certain opening. Also our opponent can take as out of book quickly playing some unusual opening like i.ex. The Trompowsky. So we need to think soon and IMHO 15+10 or 10+5 is good to practice openings and every thing.

OTB is important because there is a psychological battle that you won't find online. For this is a luck to live in a zone where they organize OTB tournaments and the opposite is bad news.

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I'm a master and it's very very rare that I'm in preparation up to move 20. The beauty of blitz for openings is you can improve your repertoire one move at a time no matter where you're starting from. Agreed on the importance of psychology OTB, but I don't think that depends on time control, it's just about sitting across from someone.

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I meant GMs and SGM have openings pgns up to move +30 and you can see Anish or Fabi or Nepo playing some games using 10/15 min. of their time on move 30. Yes as a Master or GMs you can improve or refresh your repertoire playing blitz, but an U2000 "fish" like me we find that we are out of the book very soon and although we know our patterns we have to start thinking very soon so instead of 3+2 or 5+3 is better something like 10+5 or 15+10.

Anyway, I am convinced that online chess leads to lousy play so better do exercises, solve studies, analyze SGMs games and play if you can OTB. And analyze deeply especially your loses of your OTB games. Thanks :)

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