Why am I still rated so low???

I’ve been very serious about chess but my rating still stays very low. Why is this? Everybody says that even if you take barely care about chess you can easily get to a rating of 500. I love chess and play it multiple times every day yet I’m stuck at 400 rapids. Not only am I being bullied often about it, but I really don’t understand. Is there something I’m doing wrong? Must I get a diamond membership, or is there some tactic I should use? Please help. Thank you.

Learn the basix of openings, and think a bit more about why your opponent made the move he did.

Yeah I love the Basix opening for white

yea, the Basix opening is OP

for those who don't know heres some theory.

no really? I didn't know that! ur the next Einstein!!

Study chess alone or learn from a coach

Yeah it surprised me so much when I figured it out!

Stop playing bullet and blitz. Those are great for once you have the pattern recognition but in the mean time, they do nothing at all for your rating. In fact I would argue they are actively hurting your chess progress.

Let's look at one of your recent games. This one is 10 minute rapid. You are making lots of both positional and tactical errors. Move 4 you miss an opportunity to play Nd4, which would attack the queen and setup a fork your next move with Nc2. Even though it's a 10 minute game, you made your move in 3 seconds. In other words, you're not using your time wisely. Move 8 your opponent plays Nxf6, and you retake with your g7 pawn - breaking a core chess principle and weakening your king safety. Again, you played the response in 8 seconds. Move 14 you find Nc2+, forking the king and the rook. But the next turn instead of taking the rook, you push your e pawn. You spend 8 seconds on it. The rook was still free for the taking 2 turns later and you never found it. Again, your moves came too quickly for the time format. You end up hanging your Knight on move 18, after thinking just 3 seconds. Then you hang your queen on move 20, again after a 3 second think.

This is why you are rated so low. You aren't using the time available to calculate. You aren't thinking about why your opponent made the move that they did. And you aren't doing blunder checks before making your moves. If you don't spend the time and work on your calculating skills, and time to consider your opponent's threats, you won't improve.

My last piece of advice is to review your games - because everything I mentioned you'd be able to see yourself if you studied your own games a little more closely.

Put in the work and believe in yourself and you will improve. Good luck!

Finally some actual help! Thank you so much

Wow that is honestly a amazing explanation

You're welcome! You got this!

Learn exactly how to think in the opening, middlegame and endgame — this is what I teach.
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.

You might have just learned a lot of things and not put them together well. I recommend Chessbrah good habits series. See if implementing the habits gets you better positions and results, it might get you above where you currenrly are. I found it useful.

Improving Your Chess - Resources for Beginners and Beyond…

https://www.chess.com/blog/RussBell/improving-your-chess-resources-for-beginners-and-beyond

do 1h to 2h a day of puzzles from lichess or chesscup.org and youre set for 1k do not expect to get better all of a sudden you cannot become a GM overnight what matters most is making a consistency

Dear LJGoomba,

My name is Gabor Balazs. I’m a Hungarian FIDE Master and a certified, full-time chess coach, so I hope I can help you. Everybody is different, so that's why there isn't only one given way to learn and improve.

First of all, you have to discover your biggest weaknesses in the game and start working on them. The most effective way for that is analyzing your own games. There is a built-in engine on chess.com which can show you if a move is good or bad but the only problem is that it can't explain to you the plans, ideas behind the moves, so you won't know why it is so good or bad.

In my opinion, chess has 4 main areas (openings, strategies, tactics/combinations and endgames) and if you want to improve efficiently, you should improve all of these skills almost at the same time. That's what my training program is based on. My students enjoy the lessons because they cover multiple aspects of chess in an engaging and dynamic way, keeping the learning process both stimulating and efficient. Of course, there are always ups and downs but this is completely normal in everyone's career.

If you would like to learn more about chess, you can take private lessons from me (you find the details on my profile) or you can visit my Patreon channel (www.patreon.com/Bgabor91), where you can learn about every kind of topics (openings, strategies, tactics, endgames, game analysis). There are around 40 hours of educational videos uploaded already (some of them are available with a FREE subscription) and I'm planning to upload at least 4 new videos per week, so you can get 4-6 hours of educational contents every month. I also upload daily puzzles in 4 levels every day which are available with a FREE subscription.

I hope this is helpful for you. Good luck with your games!

Start all of you game 1. a4, or 1...a5. Make your opponents beware of your chess.