Online Blitz Crap (OBC) or Chess for idiots.

The best way to learn chess is to play a lot: practice, practice and practice. There are two common mistakes that beginners make regarding chess:

• Memorizing Opening Moves - This is the single most asinine thing you could do if you want to improve your skills. Not only is it not going to improve your chess, it will probably make you hate chess! The majority of chess haters are those that tried this approach.
  The key is obviously to read up on strategy and tactics. Concentrate more on tactics, by the way. With practice you can easily develop tactical combinations and the rudimentary beginnings of sound opening practice, which you can finally supplement with basic opening theory.
• The second biggest mistake would be to join an internet site and start playing blitz games! There is no way in hell that you would improve your skills in playing blitz. Blitz is all about thinking fast in much less time than you are normally allotted. Additionally, blitz games though thoroughly addictive do NOT improve your chess. In fact the opposite is true - your skills deteriorate.

Online chess has not followed the time honored tradition of Chess. Many chess games on the internet are 5 minute 0 increment crapfests played between idiots who think that the objective of the game is to move the pieces in less time without being checkmated.

Ooops! Did i just say that? The online morons practically invented this chess variant - Crappy Blitz, not to be confused with the blitz chess played by good players. (Note too that good players would be ashamed of winning on time with a severe material deficit) They might take the win, but this is the reason for the popularity of incremental clocks that would prevent this from happening..

These kids have a perverse mastery of moving pieces in less time, yet display a complete lack of rudimentary chess skill. Unfortunately, it is simply not enough of a chess deficit to let you checkmate them in 5 minutes!. These are the same morons who excel at 5/0 but cannot play a 1 minute 6second inc game (it is much faster than 5/0 if less than 40 moves!).

The reason being if they are down in material in the latter they will lose because the opp will always have 6 seconds to make a move. And if he is almost out of time, he can resort to checking to get some extra time. IN a 5/0 time you cannot do this and will lose no matter what despite being the superior player!

Bullet Chess

The utterly incompetent fools who play this online have to seen to be believed. Many a game just ends - no resolution - just that one player moved faster than the other! Even worse than blitz - there is absolutely no chess involved here, it is played predominantly by bored teenagers.

Note on GM bullet chess: High rated players do dabble in this, mostly to improve their reflexes and show off their ability to finish the game in the time allotted. Most GMs could defeat an average club player even if they just had 1minute total for the whole game while the other player had say 40 minutes!

So you would expect that the majority of the players playing bullet chess to be great players -right? Wrong. They are morons, complete frigging morons. DO NOT PLAY BULLET CHESS ONLINE. You would be a fool for thinking it will help you.

I think that playing too much Blitz, especially online, programs your brain through repetition to play superficial chess. It's impossible to play "real" chess reliably during blitz. I suspect the psychology behind this is like rats pushing a button for a treat, or a couch potato constantly flipping channels with the remote. You perform an action, you get some stimulus as a reward...you perform the action, you get the stimulus....

So the best advice to those who want to improve their skills: do not play blitz!

Regarding a comment below:
Playing speed chess might improve your time management skills and help you to think faster for a given situation, but it is a poor substitute for longer games. Playing Blitz should be supplemented by longer games.
Carlsen and Nakamura play longer games too.
In any case, this post was mostly a rant about players "stuck" at some rating unable to improve and whose games are made up entirely of 1/0 2/0 timed atrocities won on time. All they do is play fast - they actually feel they are better than the player they beat on time even if the opponent is up by a queen. In reality they are just better at beating the clock than their opponent. Many of the players they beat on time will demolish them in a longer game. That was my point, obviously it does not apply to players in the caliber of Carlsen.