Playing Variants Makes You Weaker

The one exception is Chess 960 which is the only true variant and the best way to play the most creatively and under the fairest conditions. Playing the variants well and getting higher ratings makes your standard chess only weaker, how can it not? Change my mind.

I feel like this is a pretty well-known fact, playing way, way too much atomic has definitely made my standard weaker :P

same here... :P

I see no way in how playing variants does not make your standard chess weaker... unfortunately.
The solution, stop variants.

I'm a variant player myself, so I'll keep playing variants...
But if you want to be good at standard, variants, with the exception of 960, is NOT the way to go......

Playing antichess made my standard better. Maybe the reason is, that my standard was so bad before, now it is less bad lol.

I also agree - my standard used to be terrible, now it's merely bad. Playing antichess has made me more aware of the pieces under attack, discovered attacks, and pieces that can be forked.

It's true in the trivial sense that time spent playing variants could be time spent improving your normal chess. You can also argue that switching between the rulesets makes you take longer to think through your moves or more prone to error if you use less time to think.

I think that using different board themes and piece sets, depending on the variant you'd like to play, could reduce this muddling effect by providing yourself with a cue as to what's going on.

Playing 960 also weakens standard chess in my case. I quit playing 960 and my standard ratings return to normal.

Variants increased my standard rating like racing kings,chess960,and more.

I agree with @SoccerTan26

Variants improve your game sense in a lot of ways, and most games are super transferrable with chess. As I am a competitive runner, I like to compare this to track events. Is training for a mile going to hurt your two mile? Or your 5km? It won't hurt it, but there will come a time where it'll stop helping.

Eventually they become too different and too specific, but do they harm you? Not if you continue to put in the same work with each variant including standard. Mind you then you get into overworking yourself but that's a whole other forum topic :D