Does Bullet/Blitz chess show your true rating?

I was wondering is bullet/blitz chess on the computer shows your true actual rating, or how good you are. I mean i often make mistakes in blitz chess due to time shortages that i often dont make in a regular game. So does blitz/bullet chess show your true rating or does it show how good a player is with the mouse?

Avoid blitz, play longer games. Blitz/bullets don't improve your rating unless you analyse them. I'd stick with cooresponce games.

Playing blitz will improve your otb play much more then correspondence will.

There's a reason why we have separate bullet, blitz, rapid, standard and correspondence ratings. However, my impression is that  a rapid chess game with say 15+15 min time controls is closer to a long game (with typically more than one hour on the clock) than to 5-minute blitz. Long game in turn is closer to a rapid game than a correspondence game. One has to have good understanding of chess to really excel in blitz or even in bullet. Therefore top blitz players are in general also strong players overall but, on the other hand, not every strong player excells in blitz.

? I think you're in a minority with this opinion. I know I disagree. My impression is the correspondence is generally considered pretty good training for OTB and blitz is considered irrelevant at best... this agrees with my own personal experience as well.

Well that depends on how you go about the correspondece chess, if you use analysis board for most of your moves and think a very long time you might get good at understanding chess but you sure won't be able to play a decent timed game.If you go about correspondence as you would a otb game then yes it will help your otb play.

Blitz on the other hand will teach you patterns (arguably the most important thing) and lots of em,you will learn to handle time pressure and you will also get a lot of practice out of your time.

It's possible that training works differently between different people. If Blitz has helped your otb play, then who am I to say it's not a good training medium?

My experience, has been that Blitz does NOT help me play better chess in general... (indeed it doesn't even seem to help me play better blitz.) Because I don't go over the games or write them down I never really have the chance to learn from them. They pass in one ear and out the other -- one five minute game erases the next, I see a lot of chess, but i retain next to nothing.

But I think a lot depends on how you learn best. Speaking for myself, I learn and retain when thinking deeply about a position and trying my ideas out. I can only do that in correspondence and slow chess.

I actually think I learn the most from going over master games, move by move, very painstakingly, trying as hard as I can to think of the best move to play next, and then seeing what the master plays.  A half-dozen times a game I'll be stuck for a move and the master will make a move that makes me think: of course! how simple! why couldn't I see that? This is very very unlike actual OTB chess, there is no clock management involved, and yet it is a method recommended by many respected trainers.

the answer is definitely not.

Your blitz rating here at chess.com is your "true" rating for that pool of players.  Just as your correspondence rating is your "true" rating for that pool and your OTB rating for the OTB pool.

There's no one "true" rating, and trying to compare from one pool to the next is a misguided and misleading exercise.

The hostility's a little uncalled for, and I'd appreciate if you'd stop putting words in my mouth.  We happen to disagree about whether you can compare from one rating pool to the next -- is it really something worth this kind of tone or is something else underlying your animosity towards me?

algernonn

I'm not sure what you and G are arguing about, but in general yes, I think it's very logical that the world's best players are also the world's best blitz players.

But in your OP you assume that a blitz rating must either show your true rating or simply just your technical mouse skills. However, I think it's a bit of both. Being able to have a fast computer and click fast with a mouse will help you in online blitz just as much as knowing how to rapidly handle 3-inch pieces and hit the clock in a swift, fluid motion will help you improve your OTB blitz skills. But yes, more importantly, being a skilled player at regular time controls is what makes you a skilled blitz player. You have to rely on instinct and flex the quickest and strongest moves you can. Obviously a 1500 regular player will beat a 1200 regular player at blitz all the time.

But ultimately, no, blitz rating doesn't completely show your true rating. It does in the sense that if you're a good player, then you will also be a good blitz player (unless you are missing your thumbs and/or pointer finger or something). But it also doesn't because no one plays blitz better than they do real chess. There is a cut off point, but the more time you have to make your moves, the better your moves will be, and thus your overall rating should be higher.

And TheGrobe has a valid point in that a lot of time ratings reflect and are indicative of the subset of players you challenge. Chess.com Live Blitz has a fixed amount of players who all started at 1200 not too long ago. Overtime, the overall ratings patterns will reflect a growth in player-base.

Blitz Chess and "regular" Chess are two related, but different, games.  To talk about one "true" rating is just not accurate.

In general, though, you won't find very many people who are really great at one form of Chess, and terrible at the other.  Also, I think that a player's Blitz rating has almost nothing to do with how good he is with a mouse.  It can make a difference, but not much, assuming you have no physical limitations which make you abnormally slow with a mouse.

 This doesn't seem to reflect an understanding of how ratings work.  If your opponents also make better moves, your rating won't be better.

It also ignores the fact that the "best move" might be different in Blitz than it would be in regular Chess.  I won a Blitz game a few minutes ago.  I forced a rook trade during the end game even though I was at a material disadvantage.  Why?  Because my opponent had less than 20 seconds on the clock.  With a rook and an advantage, he was playing a won position.  Take out the two rooks (mine and his), and he is still playing a won position, except that he can't force a checkmate in 20 seconds when he has to slowly maneuver pawns down the board protected by a king and a bishop.

For a similar reason, I almost always give away knights for bishops in Blitz, while I do not do that in regular Chess.  In high speed end games, Bishops are easier to play.  I'm setting myself up for an advantage in the end game that has nothing to do with how a master would judge the relative value of the pieces.

I've asked once already that you don't put words in my mouth.  As I've said previously, I do not believe this nor do I expect anyone else to.  People cheat here, it's no secret, I'm not sure how you're misconstruing what I've said about ratings so badly.

I think maybe Padman's being facetious Schachgeek.

 I've been playing an awful lot of chess.com Blitz games lately, and my rating in blitz has been slowly creeping up.  Meanwhile, my OTB "real" rating has been slowly sinking.

One data point doesn't mean very much, but it does seem as if playing so much blitz has been tempting me to make "blitz moves" in OTB chess, and that's a bad habit.  I find myself making moves sometimes OTB where I'm hoping my opponent won't notice a pending attack.  At my level, that works an awful lot in Blitz, and very, very rarely in OTB.  I'm sure things would be different for better players.  Even in a Blitz game, a master wouldn't be caught by some of my traps that work just fine against a player ranked around 1000 on chess.com Blitz.

algernonn is somewhat correct in saying that hierarchy is preserved (in a macroscopic sense), but different people will be better at different formats. 

If you want to improve your otb ELO rating by playing just using one time control then I wouldn't recommend either blitz or cc buth rather playing rapid chess. However, it's also dumb idea to play exclusively rapid. Different time controls improve different aspects of the game. For example correspondence greatly develops your analysing ability and general chess understanding. Personaly I consider blitz mostly a form of relaxation and for serious training I would prefer rapid. I feel that playing too much blitz might actually be detrimental as it easily leads to superficial evaluations but this is just my opinion of course.

No. I'd say that 60+ minute games are the best indicator of one's true strength over the board.