Tournaments give you good experience

Why do I play tournaments?  To sharpen my instincts and have the opportunity to play people outside my presets for low and high ratings.  Current tournament was 1/0 minute Arena.  End result: #66/340.    Normally, I pay 10/0 games to practice openings, figure out how to polish the mid- and end-games, and sometimes even JUST TO RELAX from a busy day.

For beginners, I would wait until you know how all the pieces move and you can see the board, detect threats, and get a good feel for it.  Then, get a good book and read about openings.  Pick an easy one, learn how it works (play a lot of games), and when you have a good grip on its strengths and weaknesses, pick another opening.  Concentrate first on white, because all openings start with white.  Then, when you get the hang of it, use the opening moves in a mirror-image for black.  Unless your opponent is an expert, they will not no clue what is going on.  It's good to be able to understand all the openings from both white and black.

Now, you're wondering why someone with a totally crappo rating is giving advice.  Because despite my rating, I can see how much progress I've made from when I joined chess.com.  And eventually, it will pay off, then my rating will go up.

Good luck to all and have fun

It's true. My opinion of your advice changed once I saw your 848 blitz rating and how little it has changed over the years.

Perhaps it's time to try another method... Your stats say you have only tried 15 tactics problems and you haven't tried puzzle Rush.  I honestly think that puzzle Rush has improved my own alertness for tactical opportunities.

Just a suggestion.

I appreciate your thoughts and good advice can come from a bad player. Doesn't have to be advice though, those are your methods and you want to share them right? I did similar things but I stopped playing tournaments because of the time they take to complete and i didn't enjoy jumping in them for small bits. It does make you hopeful to score a victory over someone with hundreds of rating difference.

My rating has improved and I don't play for ratings.  I play to increase my skills and expand my repetoire of techniques.  On Yahoo chess, my rating was 1500.  I suppose if all I did here on chess.com was play to win, I could crank my rating up.  But my point in this thread is not to care about your rating when you are learning new openings and really understanding how an opening works.   Everyone probably has a different way of learning or studying what interests them.  As for being a bad player, the only "bad" players on chess.com are those who abandon games when they are losing or they take a long time to move in a blitz game and their clock runs out before they have even moved 5 pieces. 

I don't think that that works very well.