Hi CapaChessly, hope you're doing your best and you're improving ! Long post ahead but hopefully helpful ! I'll just talk about my personnal experience, this is not the general solution, only what worked at out for me. So here I go :
First, you're not forced to play slower games as some others said. It will surely help you to improve but I get it that you could be disappointed because you spent 20, 30, 60 minutes in front of your screen and feel like you have wasted that time if you lost. If think you can play blitz but only if you don't care about the time, which is really difficult especially for us kids (I'm 15). But when I play rapid or slower games when I lose, the very next game I'm playing too fast, blunder pieces don't play as good as I think my level is. Some people are just not made for slow games and I am part of those persons. But you seem very determined and if it doesn't discourage you, then go ahead, play some rapid, go study books, watch videos, analyse your games take some lessons etc., it's the best way to improve. I just say it can be difficult. And hey, we're 15 we, at least I personnally, are just here to play games and try to improve fast even though it doesn't really work like this lol. So if you can, do what other people, who are 10 times better than me and I respect them a lot, I don't want them to take m'y post as an offense to their method by th way, told you. But if you're like me, firstly you should absolutely stop playing bullet. You can keep play blitz games but don't bé in the mindset "if I blunder I might win on time so I'll just stall and see what happens" because this is a waste of time, it won't help you improve. But in bullet, you're focused about winning on time or set traps to win in a few moves. You should be prepared to play games that last over 70 moves at least. And lastly, just do all your free daily puzzles on chess.com and others on lichess if you want, then play a lot of games. You don't have to play 30K games I think if you don't feel like it's a good investment of your time. But at least create a daily routine where you play at least 10 games a day for example. And for those 10 games, just forget about elo. At the end of these, see if you gain or lost some but not in-between them. Then analyse what you think is your most interesting game, where you feel like you played well and played some good moves but also some mistakes and learn from it. Otherwise I would say you're not dedicated enough. And about this platinum sponsorship, of course I can't afford that for you lol but I would say it is not mandatory until a certain level in chess (I'd say around 2200). It sure helps you but there is largely enough free ressources on the internet to help you improve. So all that to say you don't HAVE to learn and study everything because your brain is made to recognise patterns and it will automaticly do that from your games and that's why I think until what I considère a really good level, it's ok to just play games and you'll improve quickly. Oh and yeah another thing is don't put yourself a deadline, it will only stress you out more and it will influence your play. This is really difficult : My personnal goal is to get from 800 to 2000 elo in an unlimited amount of time, which would be the pinacle (is that a word?) for me in chess. I am currently around 1600 and I can tell you the stress gets to me when a reach a milestone and I quickly loses elo back to the previous hundred so just try too accept when you lose and don't look armt your rating too much.
I've probably repeated myself a thousand times so I'll stop here but I hope you'll read this and that you will reach your goals ! I don't really know what time it is in the US but it is very late at night in France so have a good day !
how did blud see that
im the flash