Playing on the internet can be a chess killer and a mind-number. Since 2014 I have been almost purely been "wasting my time" on 3+2 and shorter blitz without mu

Playing on the internet can be a chess killer and a mind-number. Since 2014 I have been almost purely been "wasting my time" on 3+2 and shorter blitz without much improvement. The glory days for me were 2012-2013, when I could set aside a full day and play in G45 or G60 Saturday Swiss at the Portland Chess Club. 15+15 sounds great but you can also go for 30 or 45 or 60 minute games online! Even if not in person, with those time controls at the low end of classical, you will find yourself thinking more deeply to re-wire bad habits. The mistakes will have more investment behind them, so you will tend to review the games and learn/internalize from them more. Especially if you find a good sparring partner, or set the rating range -0 +500, and only play people who are better than you. I'm on Lichess if you like: https://lichess.org/@/andytratt https://lichess.org/@/andytratt :) I disagree a bit with correspondence because I think few people are wired to take it seriously. I've been doing correspondence Go and some days I just make a move because I'm busy with other things, so it really has to be a priority over a long time period. Also, I tried Diplomacy a couple times last year with various groups (https://www.backstabbr.com/ https://www.backstabbr.com/) and found that it's a rare breed of human who, even in hacker demographics, can focus on such correspondence activities to my (very minimal) level.