15-Minute vs. Blitz

Pretty sick bullet win for me. As you see, however, the quality of play for even a ~1400 bullet player falls off tremendously from just 3+2 to 2+1...let alone 15+10, or 45+45, etc.

Are you playing USCF tournament chess? I mean, there's no way to attain a real USCF rating today without playing primarily rapid chess. That's what it seems 90%+ of the tournaments are. When I say rapid, I mean rapid according to FIDE. Of course here in the States we have to be different and have "quick" chess which just sounds dumb.

I'm going to have to look around more for events in southeast NY state here. There's some great action up in Binghamton but that's a pretty big hike up 17 for me. Other than that, there's a 35/5d swiss which runs every Tuesday night and is literally a few miles from my front door. Where the games that I really want to play in are in North Jersey and Manhattan and I have to find a way to get in there more and come up with the reg fees.

Hmm, it's funny Ziryab's rule seems to apply here. You usually find only rapid/blitz (15/15 or less) or 90/30 (wich last at least four hours between strong players).

Related: There are actually more 90+30 tournaments and leagues online than there are 45+45...for whatever that's worth.

Have not read everything, but i do not think rapid/standart rating here can show real strength of a player. Simply becouse of cheaters. 5 or 3 min game cheaters are more rare and in this time control in order  to be high rated (1700-1800+ as me he-he) it requiares strong board vision so you dont hang pieces and good tactic vision, abillity to wuickly evalate positions and make good decision, intuition and reflexes, that can be achieved by playing a lot and studying. And if you are good at blitz that often means your longer time conrols will be not far from eachother. Unless you are me, mine bullet rating here was 1900+ but standart was 1600 but now i fixed it.

Also in online rapid/standart players often get bored. Music will be on, youtube on, skype on, food, phone, internet,... so they are not playing as they should be in like otb.

Also i would like to point out a one can no claim that he is good or strong when his rating here is zero or low. Chesscom is established as #1 chesssite, some places like icc might have little stronger competition, but i think this is for higher ratings and there is no better true skill measure than having played hundreds of games here vs whole wolrd 10-20k players online.

I advice low rated and beginners to play more quick games than slow. Simply becouse they need experience than anything else.

"but i think . . . there is no better true skill measure than having played hundreds of games [of blitz] here"

Try a tournament and see the difference for yourself 

Well, there's no question that the large (#1 in the market) population is the best selling point of Chess.com. That and ChessMentor.

That said, I can't agree with everything you're saying. ICC + Lichess have a lot more to offer than just slightly stronger competition at the top of the food chain. That's drastically oversimplifying any comparison.

That's the other thing: Nowhere online can you find a better replication of the tenacity OTB games contain than on ICC. Whether it's one of their league games, daily/monthly tournaments, or the pairing pools - ICC is by far the toughest competition online. Your ratings there will be closer to your true OTB ratings than anywhere else. Chess.com isn't drastically off, though.

As for visuals and innovation: Lichess is the clear frontrunner here. Using Stylish, there are just so many ways to customize your visuals and experience over there and they're developing (and already have developed) numerous advanced analyzation methods for post mortems. It's a site that is here to stay and only getting better each day.

I believe 30 minute is perfect for training matches, but OTB games i am agreeing it must be slower than 90+30

Now I flipped back to the 3/0 pool on ICC and almost beat this 1154. That's his 3/0 pool rating, obviously. I flagged and he had 15.1 left on the clock. I think it's pretty obvious that blitz isn't hurting my game

I do.

In my city, there are four weekend tournaments per year with time control of game 120 (or 115) + 5 second delay. I play in most of these. Because I take a third round bye, that's only 16 games per year. Not many, but enough to maintain a rating. Because I won our August tournament, I will play in a five round all-play-all invitational next June and July. The winner plays in the City Championship match against our current city champion.

I could play more by traveling to Missoula (three hour drive), Seattle (five hour drive), or Portland (seven hour drive). Several local players go to events in Reno and Las Vegas most years.

If I play on Thursday nights at the Spokane Chess Club, there are several more events with these time controls--quads and club championships. The club also has many rapid and rated blitz events. I usually stay home because I don't function well on Fridays after playing chess on Thursday night.

I also run about eight game 30 youth events every year. There's one today. These are not USCF dual rated, but rather rated by the Northwest Scholastic Rating System.

I don't mind rapid time controls for rapid chess with a separate rating.

Online, I play g/15 and 15/10 as my "slow" live games. I put more effort into fewer games at three days per move. I also play endless g/1, g/3, and g/5 online. 

Blitz is much more fun.

But with a small clock your computer hardware and software and lag must be working perfectly.

The blitz rating are almost meaningless due to this requirement.  

I lose a lot of games on freechessdotorg because my opponent's lag throws me off my rhythm. ICC is vastly better. ICC took steps to address lag more than 15 years ago. Laggers cannot enter the pools, for example.

Alas, I give my money to chess.com for the videos and support chessworlddotnet. I also subscribe to Informant, which isn't cheap. An ICC membership would reduce my wine consumption and I'm not willing to make that sacrifice.

About the game above 5...b6 was bad, he had to play 6...c6 at least to reduce light square weakness (although slows his development) 11.e6! good to me 11.e6 fxe6 12.Ng5 Rf6 13.Re1 e5 14.d5 pretty much compensation to me, he will have lots of trouble activate his pieces. 16.Ne7+ Kf8 17.Nxc6 winning some material without any compensation to me, moves are with threats so you have time to escape the knight, even you can accomplish d5 and find perma-outpost on c6 for your knight if he manages to play terrible 22...Re2 i decided to not look the game anymore :D

This is all +1 and exactly why I've stated that if I was playing a game online that mattered, I want to play on ICC. It's the best network and has the smoothest client in Blitzin, with a great deal of cheat prevention in place.

Timeseal, timestamp, speedtrap, etc - These are all of the things that a lot of chess.com users don't even know about but once you play with them in place, you don't want to be without them again.

Chess.com really needs to hurry up and move v3 from beta to official release. V2 is just ...unacceptably behind the times in live chess. Quite frankly, so is V3 the way it is in beta now, too. Compared to ICC, Lichess, FIDE Online Arena, etc? Yeah.