How to improve at chess

So, it's always a good idea to solicit ideas from those who are smarter, better, and more experienced than yourself.  In that frame of mind, I'd like to ask the experienced players around the best ways for a relative novice to improve at chess.

Some quick notes:  I'm around 1200-1250 strength by my non-expert estimation.  Like all players around my rating, I struggle with outright blunders and leaving pieces hanging sometimes.  I know common chess ideas like opening principles, normal tactics like forking, double attacks, etc, and basic pawn endgame strategies.  I know one opening well as white (Queens Gambit) and I know a few very basic defenses as Black not so well.

So how do I improve?  What are the best ways to get better?  How can I move past simply knowing basic strategies and a few opening lines and improve my ranking?  I have my own ideas but I think it's always best to ask the experts the best way to move forward.

One quick note:  I'm a grad student right now, aka dead broke, so any advice that's along the lines of "Pay a GM for private lessons" will just make me cry.

the good news is you dont need much cash to get really strong.

you just need to grill tactical patterns deep into your brain. you need be able to spot tactical potential by knowing the themes well, and have seen them from a variety of angles. you need to be able to caculate deeper and broader.. not to mention cleaner which I think is often overlooked.

you could pay for a sorted tactics book like rienfelds 1001, or try chesstempo or something like that. also tactics trainer here but Im not a fan. (note: the sites are scrambled and not sorted, I think its very important to have them sorted)

openings are irrelevant until you can keep the pieces on the board. any quesitons pm me

Post a few of your games (losses only!) and let the good people of chess.com give you a critique.

Danny, I'm not that much higher rated than you but maybe that will make my advice useful.

At the moment I'm spending about two hours a day on chess and improving fairly consistently.

Main area you need to improve at our sort of level is tactics. I spend about 40 mins a day on Tactics Trainer here, if you can't afford membership, there are free sites like ChessTempo.com where you can do problems. If you stick to doing half an hour every day it's amazing how quickly your tactical 'muscle' develops.

In terms of openings, just understand the ideas behind one opening for white and two for black (one for d4 and one for e4). I spend about another half an hour going through master games reasonably quickly and usually games that are in one of the three openings I use.

If you do this you will see typical plans and also the type of middlegames and endgames that stem from your openings.

I spend another half hour studying strategic concepts via books or videos - again, if you don't have the money for membership here or to buy books, there's plenty of free stuff on the net and some good videos on Youtube by the likes of Sean Godley and Kingscrusher.

I spend the last half hour playing a 15 min each game on Live Chess here, and if I'm outplayed in the opening checking back over master games to see where I went wrong. Outside of these two hours I play some blitz for fun and to build up pattern recognition.

I think this is a much more practical way of learning openings than memorising reams of variations without understanding them - and at our levels players are going to take you out of 'book' in the first few moves anyway.

By following this plan for the last six weeks or so, my ratings on standard and blitz chess here have gone from 1500 to around 1650 and I have a tactics trainer rating of over 2000. So hopefully that's of some use for you.

Thanks for all the help.

After reading the advice, I went and signed up at chesstempo.com and tried it out a bit.  They seem to have a really good site, and I'm definitely going to use them to "build tactial muscle".

I've been watching youtube videos as well for the last few weeks.  There are a lot of good videos out there.  Campione mentioned Sean Godley and kingscrusher.  I haven't watched their videos specifically, but I will definitely get to them.  Videos are awesome for learning openings because you can watch someone quickly play through several lines, point out how to counter different opponent tactics, and show common traps, all very quickly and easily.

I haven't yet posted any games to the forums here, but I plan to do that soon.  I'm waiting for a good game to post (one that I lose, but half my losses are just blundering a piece, so I'm waiting for a good long battle that I lose).  I also hadn't thought about playing over GM games, but there are youtube videos about that as well, so I'll try to take a look at those as well.

I wanted to update this thread with a few of the things I've done.

I've increased my chess.com rating by about 50 points since I posted here, from about 1270 to around 1320.  I've watched a couple youtube series on certain openings to try to get familiar with a few openings.  The biggest thing I've been doing is going to chesstempo.com and using their tactics tool.  I've gotten my rating up to about 1560 on chesstempo, although that doesn't correspond at all to any chess rating (I wish!).  Doing that 4-5 times a week for 30 minutes has been really helpful.

I've posted maybe one game on the forum, but hopefully I can post more games soon.  Other than that, thanks for all the help!

Danny

 i think it's a gift if someone has a talent. But the most important is thing is the practice. You look away 1 time and it can decide the game. and I'm not so good,  but I play chess almost every day. Greetz!