Quick chess really hurt my chess game...

     I joined this site with the goal of improving my over the board chess game.  At first, I only played turn based chess and my game got better really fast.  I quickly moved up to a 1500 rating and my over the board game improved as well. I felt pretty good.

     I started to play live chess and I found that I could only play quick games because I always disconnected on longer games.  I played 652 quick games and got to be pretty good at it.  I had 238 losses and a huge number of them came from disconnecting.  Sometimes I would disconnect two and three games in a row, on bad days.

     I found that my turn based chess rating plumeted to 1326 and I had 20 or so losses in a row. 

     I am back to only playing over the board and turn based chess.  My rating has went back up to 1360 and I feel like I am back on track. 

     Anyone else have similar experiences with quick chess and blitz chess, as far as hurting their chess game?

I never play blitz and rarely play quick games. Chess is a game of strategy, wittling down an opponent's defenses and formulating strategies while demolitioning your opponent on a single blunder. Blitz undermines this strategy completely, as it is based on pattern recognition, memorizing openings and opening traps, and making sub-par moves in the interest of preserving time. Quick is okay, if it is longer limits, (10+ minutes or 10 minutes and increments) but I still prefer OTB tournaments and turn-based chess.

I have noticed, however, that quick games hurt my OTB games, because I work on time rather than strategy. So in that way, I have had similar experiences.

I think what you are referring to is chess block ! at least that's what I think i have my game is stagnating hopefully I will get through it and progress to the next level!

I play turn-based chess as well as a variety of speeds on live chess, and I don't think that any particular harm can be done if you practice playing at many speeds.  For instance, I love playing 2 minute quick games because I find them to be very relaxing and feel like they're improving my "chess intuition."  It used to be that I would get too used to 2-min (or 5-min, or 15 + 10 seconds, or 10 minute 4 second delay, or 30-min, or whatever), and would have trouble adjusting to other games, but I think that if you keep it "mixed up" for a long time you can become good at playing at any speed.

I think it is good to use the different speeds for different purposes to maximize your development in chess. Fast games to memorize opening lines and pattern recognition (wich is useful in slow games aswell) and slow games to learn strategy and learning to make the BEST moves every move.

I myself am far from a good player and personally, I hate quick/blitz games, but this may be the reason for my poor performance at chess!

The way I view fast games is that you need to determine the average amount of moves it takes to play a whole game, say roughly 20-25 moves. You can then divvy up the time limit so you know how long you should take for each move, for example in a 2 minute game say 5-6 sec. Use the full time you have allocated per move to see what your best option is and then take it. In essence, this is purely the only difference between OTB/turn-based long games to quick/blitz.

I see the main advantage of this is for conditioning yourself and adapting playing styles, much like mosqutip mentions above. Eventually, after playing many of these games, you will come to learn/recognise traps and set plays and apply this transparently in your tournament-style chess games. I find that when playing chess games without time limits, I think see all the potential moves including all the bad ones, but by the time I come to deciding the move I am about to make, I find that I forget what the "bad reason" was behind making a particular move (very amaturish I know). In my opinion, playing faster games tends to in-grain these lessons into you so you improve your overall game.

You mean 1-minute chess. I experimented with 1/0 yesterday and it seems to me a poor training method for non-titled OTB players.

• It's not good practice for thought process--what thought process?
  
• It's not good practice for time pressure, because the worst time pressure you can ever be in USCF games is 5s/move.
• It's not even good practice for openings because many have a specialized and non-typical repertoire for speed games.
• You have to learn pre-moves, which don't exist in OTB games.
  
• I observed games between players at the 2000-level and even those, objectively, were low-quality and involved hanging pieces.

I agree and it is my experience too. The fastest time control that I find useful is 5-minute. 15-minute and longer is probably even more helpful. In any case faster than 5-minute is just not as enjoyable to me. Most of what makes chess interesting (planning, calculating... thinking) is very reduced. Although, I actually did much better in 3 0 than in 5 0 when I played it.

BTW: Part of the problem with using 1 0 to improve time pressure play is that the whole game is time trouble. In tournament games, time trouble usually occurs in the late middlegame and onwards. Moreover, your opponent is often not in time trouble and gives you time to think as they analyze. More importantly, because your opponent is usually not in serious time trouble, your moves still have to be decent. In a 1 0 game, they just have to be played because both players are more in danger of losing on time than due to mate.

I'm curious, how long is alotted in OTB sanctioned tourneys? 20 min? 40?

I play quick in live chess to hone my chess intuition and to find out what doesn't work in strange off beat openings.  I also play it because I find cheaters don't seem to be able to translate the moves from the engine to the live board quickly enough to win games and stay away from 1 min quick.  

I also find it super interesting when someone is rated 2400 in turn-based, but 1300 in quick with over 500 quick games played.

Unless your opponents play well, you may just be reinforcing poor decisions so that they become ingrained in your chess intuition. To train intuition accurately, you must face critical continuations. Playing Qf3 and Bc4 in any opening would seem like a clever idea if one was exposed to players who failed to defend f7 90% of the time but stronger players would show the flaw in this idea. Unfortunately, in quick chess, even strong players often fail to come up with the right ideas in the given time so there is little direct feedback based on the quality of the moves.

As for cheating, I don't think it's a serious issue at our level. Moreover, it's possible to cheat at any time control, even 1 0. It's a fallacy to think that the only way to cheat is to move the mouse based on an engine's suggestion. A program can move the cursor for you and click wherever you want it to automatically. Sure it's a deterrent to cheating, but it doesn't prevent it. Nothing does. However, living in fear of cheaters and sacrificing good chess or fun is a little like not going outside due to the existance of criminals. Anyway, over the long term, most cheats are caught and even if some aren't, they have gained nothing except an empty rating.

BTW: Some players are really good in CC but rarely play blitz and are quite weak at it. Even some that play blitz regularly are compartively poor. I know several players like this and can vouch for their authenticity. CC is just very different from live games.