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I disagree so strongly. At some point in my life, I had distorted my thought process heavily by fast chess. I in particular played it like Tal would. The element of surprise plays a major factor.

I was never as good as you in chess. My best game ever with normal time constraints was a tie against a 2400, and my regular games are around 2000. But it was only a hobby.

What is troubling about chess in general is that it cannot be truly learnt. As computers have shown. With that in mind, let's also assume that intution plays a role. The classical offers the second best way of determining who has got it right. Fast chess kills your intuition as it offers incentives to play the more wrong game that your opponent might blunder to. When I play normal chess, I play in a way that is safe up to somewhere between 5 to 7 moves depth, at my best days. Magnus has more depth obviously. So if his opponents play for the win, they will lose. And under time control, he has a better full view of the board, so plays faster and that's all as much I can tell. But if his opponent has an different, perhaps intuitive, style, which I have no understanding of, he will lose. The key point being, that the move that is the best up to depth 7, can be the move that you could see how it loses you the game if you had more depth.

To my main concern about your comment, playing fast, particular bullet and blitz, indeed damages your right intuition if there is any. And if the person is anything like me, it might bleed into other aspects of their life, with consequences.

My advice to anyone who plays fast games and has a sharp and computing mind, is to spend time at a creative activity, such as writing, some sciences, and put chess aside for a year. Develop your creative skills, and then you'll notice the negative impact of bullet and blitz (With all due respect to your skills, the terms bullet and blitz makes me feel a turmoil now), which I consider to be quite serious.




The shortest time control I play is 10+0 and I feel that at my very average level, I don't learn anything from it (especially if I get on a discouraging losing streak). These days, 15+15 is what I try to stick to on Lichess so that's my preferred control (still considered fast by OTB standards).

With that out of the way, I suspect that the difference between bullet and classical people is probably like the difference between a sprinter and a marathon runner.

In my other spare time, I like to ride bicycles. Everyone who doesn't do it thinks it's a dangerous thing - but the way I ride isn't the way that most people think I ride. I prefer the slow, cautious, zen and analytical approach compared to the "intuitive" fast, mad rush that most people will be familiar with when they think "cyclist". I can go fast when required as I have developed and applied my own theory for it, but most of the time I prefer to just take it easy. So I see some parallels there - horses for courses.

I don't really buy the idea that there's such a thing as intuition. Intuition to me merely means that someone who apparently demonstrates it cannot understand how to explain their intuition (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/intuition). Many seem to be equating it to a higher form of intelligence but I don't buy that that is the case.

I daresay that Fabiano Caruana is probably pretty good at classical now and can perhaps afford to practise shorter controls a lot more. He's actually not bad at it, but has had inconsistent results in the past. But who knows - in 2020 we might be seeing a lot less Rossolimo and Petrov.




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