Stuck at 400 ELO and I've been playing for a year.

Hello, o believe with proper training the "average human" with an 1-2 hours training 5 times per week can reach 1500 (maybe all the way to 1800-2000!). It is not that difficult to become decent, it is very difficult to become professional! As a chess coach i can assure you that reaching your goals is very possible!

I have helped tons of students to improve in the past and i will do it for years to come!

do puzzles until you never hang a piece because you 'didn't see it'.

that alone should easily get you to 1000.

#65, Too bloody right.

I'd recommend playing the London when playing as white. I only started about 3 months ago and have managed to increase my elo from about 350 to about 850. It avoid a lot of the traps that come with e4 openings and you'll manage to get your set up probably 80-90% of the time. Also I think players at our low level aren't as used to seeing d4 openings. The other thing I'd recommend is to analyse your losses not your wins.

I literally posted the same freaking thing, but for me, it's like 700-800. So sad that people like us can't seem to get to 1000 after months and months of playing.

A high rated player will look at your games and thinks: how does he miss that?

I want to point out that the reason a high rated player can see the hanging pieces immideatly and a low rated player doesn't immideatly see it, is the difference in intuition.  You are playing against low rated players for 1 year, who don't punish your mistakes. This is very bad for your intuition. 

To fix your bad intuition I advice you to play 5000 blitz games against leela zero, you will probably lose them all, but try to keep the score difference between you and leela as low as possible. (pawn = 1 point, bishop = 3.5 point, horse = 3.2 point, tower = 5 point, queen = 10 point)

The reason that I think playing against leela zero will fix your bad intuition is because leela zero immideatly punishes your mistakes. Leela zero also plays more human like than stockfish for example. It takes allot of time to fix your intuition, bad habits are hard to unlearn, but after 5000 blitz games, it will have improved tremendously.

1 3 3 5 9 works fine:

puzzles always punish mistakes.

You are right, but there are is a big problem with puzzles.

Puzzles don't help you with:

 - time management priority intuition
 - positional priority intuition (A puzzle always has a solution containing a tactic, forks, pins, discovered attacks etc. What if there is no tactics to be created on the board, which is most of the time in a game  )

 - mistake priority intuition (some mistakes cost you allot more than other mistakes)

 - piece danger intuition( if you send a piece close to the opponents pieces, it has a big chance to be hanged, puzzles don't learn you this intuition as much as games do) 

 - complexity intuition (if you make it complex for yourself and simple for the enemy, you might have a problem)

Looking at this game, there was an obvious move that lost you the game, when there was a very simple way out https://www.chess.com/game/live/45783593201?username=itsmaddening

You played 10....... Nxh1+ which allowed your Queen to be taken by the Knight

The simple alternative winning move was Qe7+, then Knight x h1 after he defends the King or moves it.

The way that I am continually improving at chess here is by seeing the analysis at the end of the game and following where the computer can see better moves than were obvious to me.

This is easier said than done. I have some questions that dissect that issue for him:

1. Did he see that his queen was under attack? <- this is piece danger intuition, you can get this from doing allot of games against leela zero

2. Did he know that seeing no solution is different from there truly being no solution? <- this is  knowing that your initial calculation has always errors and that slowly checking every move is a tool that surpasses your initial calculation. Your initial calculation + calculation ability can be improved by doing lot's of puzzles.

3. Did he know that preventing losing queen is worth the time of checking all possible moves of the queen <- this is mistake priority intuition and time management intuition, you get this from doing allot of games against leela zero

puzzle rush trains intuition:

by improving your pattern-recognition;

lessons develop positional understanding.

Positional understanding and intuition are two different things. Just knowing what a good position is, doesn't mean you can apply it, you need intuition for that. What is more important, position a, position b? Only by doing allot of games you know what position is more valuable.

About puzzle rush. Puzzle rush gives you 1 part of the complete intuition pie, and you get a huge emphasize on that. However if you are in a game you need intuition of the whole pie.

Take for example a 500 rated player who only did puzzles, he got the average of 500 of his total skillset:

- 100 rating positional intuition

- 2800 rating calculation intuition (because of all the puzzles he did)

- 100 rating time management intuition

- 100 rating piece danger intuition

- 100 complexity intuition

etc.
It is actually very hard  to improve the rest of the intuition if 99 percent of your brain is composed with calculation intuition. You will rely too much on your calculation ability and probably still hang pieces.

Knowing the value of pieces may assist, that a Q is worth 9, N=3, B=3, P=1, R=5. Makes it simple to understand that losing the Q is really bad and should be avoided at all costs.

I'm not certain about 400-level, but I occasionally observe 600-level games - because my son is 600-something (and I try to watch most of his online activities). He blunders frequently, as do his opponents - allowing simple forced checkmates, leaving undefended pieces strewn about the board, opening with 1.h4, etc. 

(For that matter, I'm 1100-something in rapid and frequently miss a forced checkmate sequence or try to move a pinned piece.)

When I was a beginner, I liked to use my rook, so I always played 1.a4 and 1.h4 to get my rook into the game.

Also, I used to think the primary goal of the opening was to gain space, so I would play things like 1.e4 f6? to stop the e pawn from going to e5.

Doing puzzle rush doesn't automatically give you an edge in every situation. While playing lot's of highrated games does give you an edge in every situation. I bet the best training would be playing 100000 games against Magnus, but since that is not possible, playing 100000 games against leela zero will do.

Yes I'Idont

puzzle rush & lessons are 2 different things:

tactical intuition versus positional intuition;

take some lessons & do some puzzles lol.

What kind of lessons are you talking about, IRL lessons with coach where you can repeat and customize material on the fly or the chess.com video lessons? Because video lessons are static with exactly same 5 - 7 exercise and unless you pay, you can repeat each lesson once (1) a week. Maybe there are some positional puzzles which I don't know about?

Intuition comes mostly from patterns you have learn through experience with clear feedback loop, where your brain knows subconsciously that some situations or moves are better without having a clear answer, in that moment, to why it is better. Feedback loop for position is harder since you don't get a clear indication that this position is worse unless you actually review your game and work through it couple of times.