'Theoretically' speaking blitz supposedly trains your overall board vision & scope/potential of your pieces. Trains you to visualise potential swindles be you the swindler or 'swindlee' quicly & trains quick positional assesment. The more you play it the better your otb play.

Somehow it never applied to me! The worst part abt blitz is you can end up extremely positionally & materially superior to your opponent but yet lose cos your flag dropped 1st. That to me sucks cos in internet chess thats a huge loss of rating points especially if you lose to somebody rated far less than yourself. It affects the morale. hence ive stopped playing blitz on the net.

Apologies if this is well-trodden ground (in which case please direct me to those fields).

Assume you played chess as a little kid, and did quite well, but never really got coached, nor really bothered with theory. You then discovered theory and got depressed about it. You realised this was too big a topic and moved on. Years later you suddenly played some computer chess again, on and off, and the odd tournament. Did not lose all the time, but hardly got anywhere (of course). Then moved on. Then suddenly, when very busy with other things in life, you 'got ICC'. You suddenly started trying to do what you never really did properly, and worked through some books, like Tarrasch and so on. You played more and more and improved slowly. You buy opening books, but it takes forever to work through a single variation, and you are committed to other things.

You start playing blitz for the first time in your life. You suck at it. You don't seem to get much better at it. You try your best to fit in long games, but who has 4-6 hours to spare on a daily basis? You try to fit in some book-learning, but it is painfully slow, and you start playing more and more bad blitz, at the expense of analysis and proper games. After all, you do want to have fun, and blitz is chess, in a way, which you can at least play in under 10 minutes.

So, you have not lost this new-found interest in the game, nor your desire to improve. You think about the game an awful lot. Sometimes it's almost scary. You lose many hours to the game that you should probably be spending on other things. But you still don't really have the time to work anything like 'full-time' on playing long games or learning theory. So, you end up playing more bad blitz.

Putting it all into a short question: does the bad blitz do harm? Are you wasting time you could have spent on theory or a few long games playing games of McChess? Or is the repetition of patterns you eventually experience in blitz better than just the odd long game and some theory a week (bearing in mind that you would forego the pleasure of actually finishing many games of chess that way)??