Improving Your Chess - Resources for Beginners and Beyond…
https://www.chess.com/blog/RussBell/improving-your-chess-resources-for-beginners-and-beyond
Good Chess Books for Beginners and Beyond…
https://www.chess.com/blog/RussBell/good-chess-books-for-beginners-and-beyond
Learn and apply the most important principles of chess. - (core of my teaching)
Always blunder-check your moves.
Solve tactics in the right way.
Analyze your games.
Study games of strong players.
Learn how to be more psychologically resilient.
Work on your time management skills.
Get a coach if you can.
Just do lots of chess--with as much variety as possible. Do tactics every day. Play over annotated games from the masters of the past. Play the bots--starting with Martin 
--and work your way up. My practice with the bots has been that I don't move up until I've beaten the current one 3 times. (And don't use the takeback feature! That encourages laziness). It's great that you're dipping your toe into the tournament scene! That's a great way to improve. Good luck with the little kids who can barely see over the board, though. They're killers!! I don't know how much time you have, or whether you're retired, but 30 to 60 minutes of chess every day is way better than 2 or 3 hours sporadically. BTW, I'm 73 and STILL on my journey to improvement. I don't know if I'll ever even hit a steady 1250, but I'm loving the journey.
I am 61 yrs old (I don't think that matters but....), and I have decided to learn how to play chess. I have taken some of the online lessons and played some games against BOTs and I am in my first tournament. I am finding that I am getting overwhelmed with all the different openings and strategies either online here or on YouTube. What is the best way to improve ? should I stop researching and just stick to one opening / strategy for a while and then move on? Suggestions? I did find online some "core beginner principles" and thought maybe I should just stick with that and understand how opponents respond. thanks. John