What is the biggest rating disparity between blitz and classical chess you know of?

@LukaCro said in #8:
> Do you have one example of big difference, on any site or server? That's what I am looking for. Someone who is strong in classical chess, but weak in blitz. I don't know any such example, this is why I ask.

I used to be exactly the example you’re looking for. Check my ratings history. I used to be 2208 rapid with a blitz rating that dipped below 1700. The problem wasn’t really an ability thing, it was mainly time management and mindset. I am 40 years old and I managed to take my blitz rating from below 1700 up to 2055 and it’s still rising. I would get a great position and then blunder it away in time trouble when I was surviving on my increment. I did some woodpecker method, worked on my openings to save time there, and got better at playing a good move rather than burn my clock looking for the best move. My puzzle storm is still miserable relative to my level. Maybe my calcified brain just needs more time to process.

@LukaCro

I just checked. At one point I was 2208 rapid and 1645 blitz at the height of my ratings disparity. Lol!but I managed to add 410 points to my blitz rating as an adult in over the last couple years.

@Le_Patzer83 said in #12:
> @LukaCro
>
> I just checked. At one point I was 2208 rapid and 1645 blitz at the height of my ratings disparity. Lol!but I managed to add 410 points to my blitz rating as an adult in over the last couple years.

Nice job, and good example :)

In my chess community, people generally have blitz rating at least 300 points lower that standard. I know some people that are 1900+ standard and 1400 or lower in blitz

Regarding, "I often hear that improving adults can become pretty good in long time control chess, but not in blitz." I don't know about that, is that a common observation?
As you noted, these ratings typically track each other. In my (definitely an adult!) case my blitz rating is usually pretty close and sometimes even a bit higher than slower time controls. I just checked my chess.com also and the same holds there as well. I am not sure how much one can infer from this though. Some people play way too much blitz and can get good at it. I guess there are very different classes of adult players; e.g., some people played as a kid, stopped playing for some reason or other, and came back to chess every once in a while. On the other hand, some people truly started playing chess as an adult.

This is a very interesting question. My own experience (52 yr old patzer) is that I'm normally 300-400 points "better" in Classical than in Blitz. I've always said to myself that this is the product of me starting semi-serious chess at age 50.

I took the liberty of doing some quick data mining with the Lichess API. I made a list of about 10000 semi-random user names and queried their ratings. About 1900 of them had both Classical and Blitz ratings with rating deviation below 75, which means they're pretty established. The average rating difference is +175: Classical average 1750, Blitz average 1575.

I found about 100 people with a rating difference higher than +500 and 3 with more than +800: rizzoscacchi, KK6991, Sweaterkev.

On the other side of the spectrum, I found only 7 people with Blitz rating more than 300 points higher than Classical.

Interestingly, for people with Classical rating of more than 2000 in my sample, the average rating difference is only +52.

Obviously we don't know how serious the players in my sample are in both time controls, and, of course, this is just a small sample. It would be great if we had age and number of years playing chess data as well.

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1a5IHWEOCat09pjV1_y3M9hovAx0zgmD5_CJFK0PEaBU

@LukaCro

Dr Skull from the Chess Journeys podcast has a pretty big difference between Blitz and Rapid on the other site:

www.chess.com/member/drscull

@RafaelNajera great analysis, thanks!

@greysensei nice example, thanks.