A self-centred, unimportant question

in the last 5 months i've gone from 1400 to 1640 with full time study for 3 of those months.. mainly from the chess.com study plan for intermediate players and from the odd youtube lecture. I'm 19 years old and only picked up chess 6 months ago after a 7 year break (i used to play in the state finals as a primary school kid but stopped for no real reason :( ), if i was able to keep up the same level of study for another year is it possible to hit 1900? What are the prospects of moving past that? For the last 2 days I've been spending half my time playing games and the other half watching the pawn structure 101 videos for the scheveningen as i use the najdorf sicilian as black. Ive been doing plenty of chess mentor courses (done 1/4 of all of them) and spend a couple of hours a week on tactics trainer (although i feel like when i do use it, i become more impulsive in games because of the threat of time being drilled into you in TT). I have bobby fischers 60 memorable games book but his annotations dont really help to understand his positional ideas.. they only explain the tactics so its not that helpful. Is there any particular study motifs/techniques i need to be doing or are there any really instructive books? 

If you are 1900, then it sounds like an inflated 1900.  I would play in more tournaments with 2200+ players to see how you really score.  Realistically speaking, you are 1600 or 1800 at best with specific playing strentghs to get you over.  Be more well rounded in your playing, get a coach.  Track your progress.  Then, come back in 2 years and ask this same question.

I think it's possible.

Everyone is different. Although if you make it in a year (or even two), I'd bet it's not your ceiling.

Sounds like you're using whatever you can get your hands on, which is great. As for books, it just depends on your level and the type of book (tactics, strategy, endgame, etc). For strategy I'd recommend Pachmans Modern Chess Strategy.

You've played an impressive number of 30|0 games. Continuing to play long games often (and reviewing them) will be important to keep improving. It's useful to keep a list of mistakes, and work on correcting ones that keep happening.

i should probably clarify that rating isnt otb.. its from here. there are hardly any otb tournaments in australia its such a shame 

I guessed so. I wouldn't have been as optimistic about 1400 to 1900 FIDE in ~1.5 years  :)

Why not?  It's more realistic than going from 2000 to 2100 in that time though due to the law of diminishing returns, which explains why it's easy to go from sucking to average and takes a little work to go from average to good, but takes some strenuous effort to go from good to great, and it's unthinkable to go from great to astronomical without highly specialized training and talent.

  RPGs illustrate this principle nicely: kill some weak monsters and you'll gain levels rather quickly at the start, but as you gain levels you need to kill stronger monsters and even with much more EXP gained you still need to put in more time per level gain.  It's why an Olympic 100 meter sprinter taking .1 seconds off their time is harder than us taking even 2 whole seconds off ours.  For us "regular" people we just need to cut out sugar (or other dietary changes) and do some casual running and no specialized sprinting training to make big gains in our sprint.  Why do you think professional athletes have very strict nutritional programs?  Even a candy bar could hurt a much needed microscopic performance gain. 

You'll want a couple of books on Defence (New Art of Defence in Chess by Soltis and Practical Chess Defence by Aagard, which is a good workbook that'll also train calculation) and especially endgames.  Understanding Chess Endgames, Dvoretsky's Endgame Manual, School of Chess Excellence 1 and Future Champions 3, and Minev's Rook Ending book are good to start with.  Perlo's Endgame Tactics is a good to have book too. 

For tactics CT-ART 5.0 and Advanced Defence are good, just remember that Convekta is horribly optimized. 

Playing very long games without a good strategic understanding is a waste of time. Players who haven't gone through chess books/material are better off to learn all the principles as best they can first, you have to know what you're supposed to be doing/looking for. Otherwise you're spending hours doing de la Maza style calcuations.  

Because the better you are, the harder it is to gain 500 points.

And 1900 FIDE is much higher than 1900 chess.com standard.

You might be taking for granted the ability to visualize and analyze. dlM style calculation is actually really important. But games also teach more. You'll pick up many different patterns: openings, tactical, strategic, technique etc. Also judgement like whether an attack is strong, how to manage your time, when you've calculated too little or too much.

It sounds good to read many books before playing a single game. But try this with a student. Try teaching a new player just one single principal, and watch them violate it their very next game. There's just too much going on during a game.

Besides, everyone says playing is essential.

Looks like Australia has a very active OTB tournament organization to me: 

http://auschess.org.au/acf/ratings/

You can reach 2000, but not on chess.com. Its sad but the reality of chess needs clubs, men, love for this running sport of variations, and the mos important, to be almost true, you need generation culture for mind games. Dont be a fool of lies, of east and genial kids, small tanks of an old broken crown, of name scid, kasparov, rybka etc...

We have a similar chess.com live standard and tactics trainer ratings. Playing chessmaster characters, I'd estimate my rating is around 1300. From live games, USCF is around 1150. I think you need to take the 30|0 rating on chess.com and subtract 300-400 points to get a real indication of your strength. You may have further to go than you realize.

They say the bongcloud can take you to GM level.

nice edge for white here