Tips for progress
What are you training? I suggest doing tactics to learn the basic patterns first, more than openings (learn opening principles, but you don’t need theory yet).
The first piece of advice to players rated below 1200 shouldn't be "Learn openings". Other things are much more important.
Learn the opening principles. There is a lot of material about this on Chess.com, so these suggestions are almost random picks:
- Learn Chess Opening Principles (by Chess.com staff).
- Chess Opening Principles: What Every Player Should Know (by Waleed Naeem).
Learn basic tactics, such as various types of double attacks (e.g. forks), pins, decoy, removal of the defender, etc. Relevant resources:
- Every Chess Tactic Explained (by Fiona Steil-Antoni).
- Study Plan For Beginners: Tactics! (by Chess.com staff).
Learn a thought process that enables you to avoid hanging pieces and spot basic tactics. See for example:
- Spotting and Avoiding Tactics (by Dan Heisman).
- How I won more games by improving my chess thought process (guest post by Jason Murray on Dan Heisman's blog).
Also look at the study plans that are linked from the posts at the top of the beginners forum:
- NM Dane Mattson's Starting Out Study Guide (0-600 Elo).
- NM Robert Ramirez's Beginner Study Guide (600-1000 Elo).
Good luck with your chess improvement!
Slow down and treat every sharp position like it's a tactical puzzle.
Keep up your puzzle training, I see you spent 2-3 hours one day last week doing lots of them. That's great, but more consistent time every other day will fast track your pattern recognition - which is pretty much 90% of all tactics.
I have been playing chess for about 2 months now and i don't feel like I am making any progress despite training everyday. Does anybody have any tips ?