Deliberate study beats repeated play The best predictor of chess performance is not the number of games played, but the amount of time dedicated to deliberate study. People tend to stop improving once they become comfortable with things (e.g after you get comfortable driving, you don't get much better) unless you challenge yourself and what you know.

This is why blitz games probably dont help much - i simply play the move that already looks good to me, instead of learning to find new good-looking moves.