Losing Consciousness

@Toadofsky said in #19:
This is nothing to do with your comment, but every time I see your username I don't know whether to pronounce it in my head like there is an amphibian falling out of the heavens, or like Tchaikovsky... please help to clear this up for me, thanks :)

Hi. I started playing seriously one year and a half ago, at age 46. I have made the same observations. I initially focused on blitz 3/0 and rapid 10/0 because that's what the streamers I watched mostly played, but I quit after quite a short while after I realised this was hurting my fledgling chess skills. I have played a lot of online daily chess and a bit of OTB classical for the past year, and just recently got back to 5/3 blitz and 15/10 rapid. My rating on chess.com is currently 1550 in daily, but only 700 in blitz and 920 in rapid. this huge discrepancy is naturally due to my not playing those formats for a year, but also to the fact that I mostly play them in subconscious mode, as you said, and my subconscious skills still suck. On the whole I believe, your conclusions are shared by a lot of people. Adult improvers who never played seriously as kids do tend to have lower ratings in fast formats.

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you are absolutely right. intuition Imo is is highly over rated and only really developed to any skill by tons of concrete analyses (not by me) and then must play that 13 year old monster one day and find out...i suck..intuition is more akin to experience i think. one day it dawned on me leaving loose pieces on open files can be uncomfortable and bites me in the ass every time...most of the time :p

Its only a game for god's sake nobody DIES if they lose!

6yocug

@QueenRosieMary said in #21:
> This is nothing to do with your comment, but every time I see your username I don't know whether to pronounce it in my head like there is an amphibian falling out of the heavens, or like Tchaikovsky... please help to clear this up for me, thanks :)

It reminds me of a touch typing software that had frogs instead of the old arcade missile game over one city, where one had to type the strings written on the frogs before they would splat on the ground... Crapaud du Ciel. Toad not frog. but maybe they were toads as well (the touch-typing game).

This might be a lichess mystery.

@TheOnoZone Hi, Ono! 46 years old and learnt the game in my 40s. My experience has been quite similar to yours, in that my rating has been higher in slow time controls compared to fast.

But one strange observation I have made is that performance may also be related to opening choices. Some time ago I was in the high 1600s in lichess classical and in the 1300s lichess blitz. At the time I played the Reti as White and Pirc/KID as Black. I decided to switch everything to 1.e4 as White and e4 e5 or d4 d5 as Black. I did this mostly to broaden my horizon, as I felt that I was missing out on so many famous openings and structures and positions by playing offbeat openings. I also decided not to study opening theory except opening principles and analyzing and learning from my games.

The result after a couple of months of this is that my blitz rating is up 100-150 points and my classical rating is down 100. This is a bit confusing to me, but my theory is as follows:

- 1.e4 leads to more open positions where anything can happen. I can beat much stronger players due to tactics (which I study a lot of), but of course also blunder early. 1.Nf3 often gave me an advantage out of the opening, but the positions were less intuitive to me, and I needed more time to calculate the best move in the middle game. Hence I was bad at blitz, due to being outplayed in the middle game or getting in time trouble, but better at classical, as I had more time to figure out how to convert.

- For Black I think the problem with the Pirc/KID in blitz was that I lost a lot of games quickly due to kingside attacks that I was able to counter better in slow time controls. With d5/e5 I don't lose quickly quite as often.

checks out for me, I started 3 years ago at age 48 and have pretty big gaps, despite playing a large number of games in all three different formats and actually enjoying blitz.

Bullet: Lichess 26.9; chess com 61.7
Blitz: Lichess 44.0; chess com 70.4
Rapid: Lichess 63.7; chess com 90.1