100-rated players are way too good

I think I'm stuck in an eternal loop of being around 100, because I can beat the 1000 elo bot while being up 20 points, all he took was my knight and bishop. But somehow a 100 elo player can play like a 1500 elo bot, and believe me I know the bots elo is inflated but theirs no way 1300-1500 elo of a bot is equal to 100 elo of a person. So if anyone knows why or how I am always losing to 100 elo people. Please respond to this.

TgmaxDELTA: From about half a dozen of your games:-

(1) You have no sense of basic opening principles. 

You moved a pawn first then a piece and generally continued to move the same piece for multiple moves.

(2) You ignored your opponents' moves and consequently lost pieces.

It is not enough to only consider your own threats, you have to consider the opponent's.

(3) You resign too early.

Just because you have lost a piece doesn't mean the game is over at your level.

Here is my advice for QUICK improvement without much additional effort:-

The COBRA system.

(C) Castle First!

As your openings are poor, just aim to castle your King in the first few moves. Move the King's Knight first (towards the centre!) , then the Knight's pawn then put the King's bishop into the vacated square g2/g7 then castle. Do this irrespective of playing White/Black. This is not the approved way to play openings and is a bit crude, but it's a very simple approach till to get better results. With this opening/defence most of the time it doesn't really matter what moves your opponent's plays. At the very least this will lengthen your games as there is no way to quickly checkmate a castled King and generally reduces the opening threats of your opponents such that their pieces tend to become uncoordinated (no plan) and subject to exploitation.

(O) Opponent First!

After your opponent's move ALWAYS ask yourself what does the move threaten, do this BEFORE you consider your move. This will reduce piece loses. You need to practice during games, it will not be easy to change your thinking process but efforts in this direction will yield fast results.

(B) Be Stubborn!

The aim of chess is checkmating the king. No matter what the material imbalance is play on till a checkmate occurs. This maybe dishearten when you lose a piece but you might be surprised how often an opponent subsequently loses a piece as well.

(R) Play Like A Rat!

Be patient and become a scavenger of opponents' mistakes. This is a very useful gaming strategy that can often be deployed. By no means the best strategy but a strategy for all that. When after (C) above think in terms of moving pieces to always be protected and interconnected. Bide your time and be very wary of your opponents threats, opportunities will come with time.

This gaming strategy will quite easily beat all the sub-1000 Bots - in my experience there is pretty must no difference in gameplay strength with these Bots, they will all throw you a piece, usually a Queen, and they seem to encourage weird opening play to boot - and as such they are very poor learning/improvement tools for beginners, imo. 

(A) Ace 1-Move Checkmates!

Practice Puzzles, use the custom format to select ONLY 1-move checkmates. Aim to do a few of these before playing.  You might want to alternate between playing and puzzles. Don't expect a fast payoff from doing this, but long term you will gain.

You will not get magically better just by playing, for most people non-playing efforts are required. ANY plan of improvement puts you ahead of beginners, so work on gaining this advantage.

Lastly - and the BEST advice which requires far more dedicated effort - get a Beginners book on Chess. You need one, pretty much any one will do! A much slower alternative is to start doing the on-line lessons, chess.com is a bit mean with these but the sooner you start the better.

Aside: Looking at few of your recent games, I saw nothing remarkable about your opponents. 

Anyone can play a perfect ish game when things are obvious.... Those great seeming 900 to 1000 players will be battered by 1600-2000 players. When I had a chess breakdown and grenaded my previous account I also felt there were really strong players at lower levels. As said above, it's appears a strong game from your opponent when your hanging pieces or not applying pressure in counter attacks

It's sad to be stuck at a certain range of elo in a long time.

We can't really do much to deal with sandbaggers.

You may consider closing your account and start a new one with higher elo to avoid them.

(Make sure you don't fall back to the previous elo range 😅)

maybe u should focus On Playing chess a bit until ur 300 ELO

Kids, when people decided to whine instead of better equipped themselves, they won't progress any further in their ratings. Reflect your ownself before putting blame on others.

To Tgmaxdelta, you should learn opening principles such as control the center and develop the pieces on the safe squares and towards the center.

There are lots of sandbaggers on chess.com

I can't get out of 100 because there are so many sandbaggers I play ok sometimes I don't but I have multiple games where I've played 900+ elo yet i'm still stuck in 100 elo because everybody is crystal or elite division

Division means little. It just means you have had some very active weeks of playing. You don't need to be "best", you just need to play enough winning games to stay in the top-N list and amount of lost games does not prevent advancement in the league, your play can be really bad.

Those aren't necessarily sandbaggers. The problem of low-Elo range is: it is a separate player pool essentially because they've paired with each other and rarely with higher-Elo pool. And within that pool skill varies significantly. A lot of randomness in the strength of your opponents at that level. So it's easy to get a losing strike and hit the 100-Elo floor couple of times. That's how you, not beginner at all could end up at 100 Elo. And your strength is great compared to some true beginners. They would call you a sandbagger. Would it be fair? No. But also it's not fair for you to call others sandbaggers.

I'm also stuck at about 100 ELO and everyone just seems really good. Does anybody have any tips?

• Stop playing online PVP chess completely, this is a waste of time for a beginner like you. You will never improve there.
• Play bots only (preferably NOT on chess.com, use desktop software).
• Always take back as soon as you realize you've made a mistake. Take back as many moves as you want.
• Avoid fast Blitz/Rapid-like moves. This is a waste of time and you will never improve. Think longer. From 30 seconds to several minutes per move in critical positions. Never think less than 30 seconds even if you think the best move is obvious
• Sometimes set up positions with few pieces to practice tactics and endgames.
• Sometimes review games of great players and try predicting each move (hide the list of moves somehow), you can think of one or two best moves. Write down the amount of successful predictions (for guesses where you considered two equally good moves, add only 0.5 to your score, three - 0.3). Compute percentage in the end (divide by total number of moves in the game). As your skill will grow, this percentage will grow too, that's how you can evaluate your skill.

Good luck!

What a thread. What’s going on?

@atharva_aaj. This player is giving advice to @TgmaxDELTA, a player that hadn’t been online in almost two years.

@PollapoChad049. This player revives the conversation two months later with the statement that there are a lot of sandbaggers. They seem unaware that that they don’t understand the game well enough to make such a claim after having only played 7 games. 

@Kramrews. This player revives the conversation once more after three months. He blames the fact that he can’t get above 200 Elo on too many sandbaggers. He seems unaware that he doesn’t understand the game well enough to make such a claim.

@AdamLovette. This player also believes there are too many sandbaggers. Finally we have an opinion from a player that does know what sandbagging is. Despite his blitz rating dropping 1300 points to under 500 in just four weeks, His rapid rating went up to ~2000 meanwhile. The rated rapid games he played on September 26, against the same handful of opponents, were won all 31 out of 31 games. In 19 of these games he won in 4 moves or less, which is beyond exceptional at 2000 rapid. Suffice to say he knows what he’s talking about. (FYI, the games I’m pointing at are such obvious examples of violating fair play that I’m assuming that I can say this without it being an accusation, especially since so many of the accounts he colluded with are already closed.)

@Im_Trash_at_Chess4321. Now I’m just confused. Why would a player think they’re stuck after playing only 17 games? It’s best if I don’t read too much into it before I start to see more patterns.

@basketstorm. All in all the voice of reason, even though I’m disagreeing about playing bots. In my opinion it’s always better to play human players.