Why’s Blitz so much harder than Rapid?

Beginners are often told on the forum to stop playing Blitz/Bullet and to focus on longer (Rapid/Standard) games since longer games allow more time to think. This advice is good, but I don’t understand why Blitz and Bullet actually are more difficult for beginners when it comes to Elo (many players (especially beginners) have Blitz ratings far lower than their Rapid ratings). You have less time to think in a Blitz game than in a long game, but so does your opponent. If the time constraint causes you to make more blunders, your opponent makes more blunders as well. So why’s Blitz harder than Rapid at equal Elo ratings?

My 623 Rapid rating is almost 500 points higher than my terrible 125 Blitz rating. Rapid goes normally for me, but Blitz is a nightmare. In Blitz, I often find myself already losing before openings are over (to players rated under 200!), but this doesn’t happen in Rapid (in which I beat players rated 600+).

That's a very good question.

The simplest answer is that ratings are not an absolute measurement like height or weight. Ratings only describe a distance (so to speak) between you and some other guy. For example 200 points. Whether that means 1000 to 1200 or 20000 to 20200 it's the same as far as the math is concerned. Chess.com could, for example, set the average rating for rapid at zero, so people below average will have negative ratings (yes the math works just as well with negative values).

So the difficulty of a time control in terms of rating is a combination of where chess.com has chosen to set the rating range, and then the players that join that rating category. For example if very few high rated players join the 10|0 time control, then it may be impossible to get a rating of 3000 even though some people have a rating over 3000 in blitz and bullet. (Yes, in theory the rating system could put you at a rating of 3000 even if the next highest rated player is 800 points below you, but the effectiveness of the math breaks down when the gaps are around 400 or higher.)

I think, it all comes down to experience. I am too, a beginner and my rapid/daily elo rating is much higher than blitz/bullet. The more games you play and analyse it, the more blunders and mistakes you found, and you can try not to repeat it again. And time will not be a problem anymore. If you play rapid long enough then you will remember a pattern and you brain will recall that pattern as soon as it recognise it and apply it onto blitz without any troubles. Elo doesn't matter about your skill, it matters about who you playing with. All you need is just a firm understand of chess and execute it well enough then you might win a game Bullet chess is a joke tho

My theory is that it's because people usually prefer Rapid and play only Rapid from the beginning and then get interested in other modes like Blitz. That is, roughly speaking, blitz players are so strong because they switched from Rapid.

Or it could be that the ELO gecko-1 rating system doesn't work for low-level Blitz games - in the sense of ensuring fair match-ups, which is my suspicion.

If the system didn't work then you would expect to see random stickiness, which I think - subjectively - is the case. People just won't improve rating once they fall into a giving rating range simply because they can't play enough games each day to overcome the system's inaccuracies - which increase exponentially the further you are away from GM levels.

If you think about it, if 30+ games are required for an accurate classical rating spread over a few months, how many would be required for Blitz? My guess is EVERYONE would have to play and maintain 10+ to 20+ games a day to ensure the same accuracy as classical.  Failing this then fair match-ups would be miles off resulting in increasing random stickiness.

If this was true you would expect to see more stable improvements in your Rapid rating - or even longer duration formats - far quicker than in shorter duration formats.

The more accurate the rating system, the more detectable real gameplay improvement would be.  

Personally I agree with the Blitz and Rapid gap. I am rated 400 in Blitz and 900 in Rapid

There are a couple things you need to realize.

1) Comparing ratings across pools is not all that useful.  For example, at one point my OTB blitz rating was 700 points higher than my classical OTB rating, and my online blitz rating was 250 points higher than my OTB blitz rating.  I know 1600s OTB with 2300 online blitz and 1800 online rapid.  I also know NMs with 2000 online rapid and 2600 online blitz.  As you can see, the ratings tend to be in a rather large ballpark, but it does not justify a pattern of blitz being harder than rapid.  They are different pools.

2) Ratings are not a measure of skill, but of performance against the pool.  If you have more players in the pool, you may have more people that are more skilled than a given player.

3) At the lower levels, all the players have the same massive problem (tactical awareness), so the results of many games are almost random.  I reviewed a game between 2 600s (rapid) yesterday where literally every move was a blunder for almost 10 moves!  When you have that kind of situation, it is only a matter of time before one of them sees "Oh, I can win a queen here! (In fact, in that game, one player blundered his queen, and his opponent turned around and blundered his own queen and a rook in the next few moves).

Some may argue the rating system doesn't work for low levels.  I can understand the argument, but that doesn't really get to the point.  Ratings are a measure of performance, not skill, so if you have games that are basically coin flips, the ratings will go up and down constantly, but average out over time.  That is how the system is supposed to work.

You just have less time lol 

Very true, but what would you expect to see if it wasn't working?

Note that if the games were basically coin flips that would pretty much ensure that the rating system couldn't possibly produce fair matches - the underlying probabilities would represent a Poisson rather than Normal Distribution.

On the contrary, if the are coin flips at at that level, every match between players in the 100-900ish range would be roughly even.

May be misunderstanding your comment here.

If every match between players in the 100-900 range was roughly even, you would see only random changes in rating.

Yes the results have more randomness to them at lower levels, but they're not actually random. It just takes more games to determine who the better player is. A 600 player may need 2 opportunities to capture a queen for free before they finally do it, but maybe a 400 player needs 3 or 4 opportunities (on average).

Anyway, very low ratings are also a bit unstable because players can improve 100 points in 1 week. Usually all it takes is a change in mindset and a dozen practice games.

Or at least... this is my perspective as someone who began as an adult.

If you're a young kid and stuck at a rating below 500 I can understand that... some of the kids I've seen posting... I can definitely understand that lol

Shorter time controls

Roughly even in that if you look at their games, both players likely had at least one win at some point and blew it (edit: and for clarity, I do not mean they could have gotten to +1.5 at some point, but +5 or better and blew it The other way, etc.).  The higher rated players in that range tend to not need as many opportunities to get it right 

The example I gave earlier is a prime example.  For 10 straight moves (5 for each player) every move was a blunder.  If you look at the evaluation graph, it looked like a lie detector test going haywire.  At that point it literally is a coin flip as to who is going to realize the have a win.

I feel that it many cases, players are able to achieve relatively playable (note my usage of the term "relatively playable" - not necessarily the best) moves within a shorter of time than they would for a full calculation (if they are even capable of doing so). And in the short time frame, it's not that easy to find faults with inferior moves. Panic sets in when the time on our side becomes relatively low. These factors combined results in blitz having a different kind of momentum from rapid.

Because the blitz player pool consists of stronger players than the rapid pool which is funny since everyone says "blitz is bad" and these stronger players should be aware of that yet they ignore the maxim themselves and play it

There is nothing unusual in this. You can see the same effect in intermediate games, 1500+ - the only the difference is that the 'needle' doesn't swing as much, but in relative terms the consequences can be the exact same. 

The reason for this is that the complexity of the position has gone about the abilities of the players to accurately comprehend - this can happen at any level. although less likely to persist the higher the levels.  No idea on the frequency of this happening, but it's quite common to see in 1500+ games.

It's a shame no one has developed an objective measure of chess position complexity as I suspect it could be more useful for players' learning than evaluations. Puzzle rating could be a good indicator but you would need a fixed timeframe to go with the puzzles to make the ratings 'fair'.

Blitz and Bullet are easy if, and only if, you have the right mindset. Most of my games are won on time by strangling my opponent with repetitive checks. Limit their opportunities, force them to use up valuable time. With less than 30 seconds left, your opponent will panic and a win should be a formality.