Am I improving fast enough?

Hello  

I have been playing for 4 months. At first, I was a complete beginner, but now I am more experienced. For example, I am already quite good at checkmating with a rook or queen, as well as forks and pins. Right now, my rating is around 600. Here is my rating progression from the beginning until now.

My final questions: Am I improving quickly enough, and do I still have potential? How can I improve faster? Is it possible for me to reach a 1000 rating by the end of this year?

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Thanks, I'll take a look

Can someone please give me specific answers to my questions?

I'd say that's a personal question, really. What are your goals? It looks like I'm approximately at the same level as you after a similar amount of time, but my goals are pretty modest. I'm 42, I'm not trying to be a master, I'm just trying to learn enough to have a good game and basically know what I'm doing.

I can't really prove it, but I suspect that the 500-600 climb is harder than it was a few years ago. There's a LOT more educational chess content than there was 5 years ago, and I'm finding that my opponents have on average play smarter and hang fewer pieces than I see when I watch video of people playing random 500 level players years ago. People are going into the climb armed with a bit more knowledge. I didn't even play a person except for friends before I knew some basic opening principles and had beaten all the Beginner and Intermediate bots with no hints or takebacks at least once, so when I played my first game against a 400 player I wasn't a complete newbie.
This also tallies with the fact that I don't struggle much against 1000 level bots but I am pretty challenged against 600 level players right now. That's fine, I'll just practice and study a bit hopefully I'll get through this slow period I'm in at the moment. I'm in no particular hurry, and I feel like I'm learning with every game still.
So that's my assessment of my own progress based on what my goals are. What are your goals? If it's just to have fun and learn and get better you're probably fine. If you want to play competitive chess and want to play it soon, maybe you should consider supplementing your practice with book study or other training tools. There are lots of articles recommending reading for people at our level.
You mentioned you want to get to 1000 by the end of the year. Why is that, just as an arbitrary goal or for a specific reason? Because if it's just a random goal then you're probably fine. You might make that if you try hard, you might not, you've been climbing steadily. It looks like you plateau'd a little at 500, but for the reasons I said above I think that's pretty normal, and in recent games you've maybe pushed through that, but it's a bit early to tell. You'll probably find you hit a bunch of plateaus where it takes a bit longer to develop the skills, then you start rising again. If you're not in a particular hurry, that's fine, you'll learn through practice! If you really need that 1000 before the end of the year, though, you can be more proactive about it and try to focus down the reasons you're losing games when you lose and see if you can spot any patterns

It looks to me like you are making solid progress. My experience has been that I hit a plateau when what was working for me no longer worked, so I have to pause and take stock. For example, I play the Caro-Kann defense and up until the 900s all I saw was the advance variation and became very comfortable with that. But suddenly I found myself facing the exchange, classical, and fantasy variations, with no one playing the advance. So I had to rethink what I wanted to do when faced with 1. e4. That's one of the many things that I like about chess, it constantly presents new challenges.

My progress is pretty random - I don’t really do anything, maybe just focus a bit more, and suddenly I gain +50 rating. But yeah, I might have to change something (probably something bad) in my playing style to keep improving.

That’s totally right! Most of the time, my opening and endgame are pretty solid, but my midgame is where I’m bad

I'm 1 month and 17 days in and I have a weird thing going where I'm either hitting most solid moves or I complete tank. It's hard for me to overcome mistakes. Things tend to snowball quickly.

bro why am I able to win against 1000 rating bots but my playing against actual people is somehow 150 like how is that possible

Unfortunately, bots aren't a very good representation of playing an actual person. They are great for practicing specific things. So, for example, if you struggle against players who bring their queen out early, it can be helpful to play practice games against a bot that says it likes to be aggressive with its queen.

ohh that makes more sense, but then why would they have the ratings set like that?

There has been a lot of discussion about the ratings of bots on the forums. As I understand it, you basically have a highly rated engine that is dumbed down to approximate various levels of play (it's just an approximation). My experience with bots is that they will play along according to their advertised style, then make an inexplicable blunder that gives you the game. I find that it is a great way to practice openings, work on calculation skills, etc without fear of losing rating points.

I think the Maia bot that isn't available on this site is more realistic in the kind of mistakes it makes feel more 'human', because it's trained on human games, but I still find it highly rated compared to humans. Like I can beat it a lot of the time on its 1100 setting and find the games 'realistic' (hey, it even once tried to do a cheeky scholar's mate on me, which I've never had one of the chess.com bots try), but I still find 600 human players more challenging in 2025, so maybe there's just a general issue with bots being overrated.
I'd love this to be solved at some point because when I found that I was routinely beating intermediate bots I thought I could probably get a rating of 1200 or so, but now I think that's going to take considerably more time and effort.

Fast enough for what? People develop at different rates. People put in different amounts of study.

Are you satisfied with your development? If so, great. If not, then put in more work.

You asked for suggestions to improve. Here is what I tell beginners.

1. Play slow chess rather than blitz. The more you think, the more you learn.

2. Analyze your games. Identify mistakes so you don’t repeat them..

3. Learn basic opening principles. I don’t mean memorizing opening sequences. Learn the general principles so that you can handle unfamiliar openings and reach playable positions.

4. Join an OTB club so you can play and learn from stronger opponents. Find a group that will discuss games with you, so you can see how they think.

5. play over the games of masters. There are great books that annotate master games, explaining for every chess level how to analyze a position.

Okay, sounds good

Thanks

Yeah, the bot’s are quite easy

Moving from complete beginner to a 600 rating in just four months is a solid improvement.