How to be a better Blitz chess Player?

Research some common openings and practice tactics

Practice bullet. 

By far this is the best way to get better at blitz.

The best bullet type is actually 2/1, which is a hybrid bullet + blitz. Most bullet players are not really good at this time control because it requires chess skill and less about time/luck, so they avoid it and only play 1/0. That way, they can score lucky time wins. Even a 1400 player can beat a 2000+ player in 1/0...I have seen it many times.

That 1/0 bullet has always been labeled as useless and bad -- with good reason. This is the bullet to avoid for developing players (who are serious about their chess).

Blitz is garbage. All it will do is frustrate you and hurt your game. I was a blitz addict for years, it is total garbage chess. I just had a minor relapse and played a bunch of blitz over the last few days and all It did was piss me off. Total freaking garbage, never playing that chump chess ever again. I'm seriously thinking of closing my account and starting fresh because I don't even want a blitz rating, I'm that disgusted by it.

Blitz isn't that bad (it does help you improve). Blitz helps you see tactics faster and helps you stop hanging pieces. So it helps at most levels of chess.

This guy gets it!

WeakChessPlayedSlow wrote:

Blitz doesn't help you improve. It teaches you all the wrong lessons. I pretty much had to retrain myself because of all the blitz I used to play, and stop playing it altogether. Just don't do it in the first place.

Blitz is really for certain people. In most cases for people who have solid tactics for openings and endgames. I would suggest in your case you take the wisdom of the two players above and focus on developing yourself before taking on blitz, time is less of a problem when you know what your doing. Also great to see your enthusiasm still Juliette, would love to play you when you have had time to practice.

sigh another unanswerable question

O.o

You need to cultivate "mushin", the blank mind of the warrior.  When your opponent lapses and a conscious distraction intrudes on him, this creates a "suki", the opportunity to strike a determinative blow. 

To be a better blitz player try memorizing chess positions. Tactics can help you with blitz

what i try to do is just make sure that my time left is at least equal to the time left my opponent has. I would guess that over half of the games do  not end in checkmate but instead one player loses on time.

The same you become a better chess player.

My rating should be at least a few 100 points higher, FWIW

My advice (other than getting better at chess in general) is to play blitz a lot. You need to practice it.

But also look for little patterns. Something you can quickly see in a position to give you an idea for a move. For example one I assume a lot of people know is a bishop 3 squares away from a knight (d1 to d4 for example) controls all the knight's possible moves toward the bishop.

So in a blitz game maybe the opponent moves their knight to an outpost, you can use that pattern to instantly move the bishop to block all its forward squares. Is that a good move? Doesn't matter, it's a fast and reasonable move.

Always be looking over your games for little ideas like that... and when they might be bad too. Maybe you're attacking on the kingside, so of course you're not going to pay any attention to a knight the opponent moves way over on the a file.

Important to do this with tactics. What makes this tactic work? Try to verbalize it in a way that it will apply to all tactics of that type. Maybe you're about to lose your knight because it's trapped... but you found a tactical way to save it! Go back and look at the game to find out what that was exactly so that next time you're not desperately calculating, you can look for that type of solution first.

Also, you need to learn an opening well and be able to play it very quickly. Ideally you only use a few seconds on your clock to reach a position 5 to 10 moves deep where you immediately know the usual ideas of the position.

This is mostly done by becoming better at chess in general (study, long games, analysis, stuff like that).

Not quite as important for blitz, but ideally you can also do the same thing with endgames. For certain standard positions you ideally can instantly know the correct winning or drawing idea, and quickly find the correct move.

Blitz won't be bad for your regular chess as long as you play longer time control chess at the same time. If you play only blitz then you might develop tendencies that are bad for longer time controls.