For me, leagues bring a whole lot of stress and you have to play bullet which is bad for you. Don’t join leagues unless you are a person who just plays chess for fun and wants a challenge.
Will Leagues make me better at chess?

For me, leagues bring a whole lot of stress and you have to play bullet which is bad for you. Don’t join leagues unless you are a person who just plays chess for fun and wants a challenge.
Who says you have to play Bullet?
For me, leagues bring a whole lot of stress and you have to play bullet which is bad for you. Don’t join leagues unless you are a person who just plays chess for fun and wants a challenge.
Who says you have to play Bullet?
No one, but people just get stressed they are not moving on, so they have to play bullet.

good grief, just play whatever you want. analyze your games. I'm a weak player that got to "silver" just by playing my normal amount. it doesn't matter. once I realized what that league thing was I played a bunch of games since it was the weekend and got to crystal. so ok yeah it is sort of fun to have a motivation to play a bit more than I usually do. but I confess I wasn't analyzing my losses lately so in a way leagues disrupted me for the worse...

Playing a lot of games should be helpful to improve at chess. But only if you take the time to analyze the games afterwards. And try to stick to certain principles of solid play (castle early, control the center etc. etc.)!
Your performance in leagues has almost no correlation to how good you are at chess. Anyone can fly through the leagues by grinding bullet games 8 hours a day. Speaking of which, if you ever join me in Crystal... God help us.

I’m rated 490 and would like to try leagues for its clear sense of progression and achievement, is this a sensible idea if I also want to improve at chess?