General Skills to reach 17/1800 OTB? Help?

I am currently 1627 USCF and have been really trying to reach my goal of 1700/1800 USCF. I am very eager to hear what skills it takes to become that strong. 

Thanks for your help,

~Happy

Use a fast mouse OTB?

I can only speak for what got me to USCF A class.  But i worked hard on endgames, middlegame planning, opening principles, the pawn structures associated with those openings, and clock management.

Thanks for the posts guys. Do you recommend anything that helped you study those things?

Study tactics until you never want to see a chess board again. That's how I got to 1900. Along with endgame work and a little bit of opening theory.

Thanks Zigwurst, finding the tactics can really help win the game!

These are the books i used:

Silmans Complete Endgame Course

Chess Training for Post-beginners: A Basic Course in Positional Understanding   

Techniques of Positional Play: 45 Practical Methods to Gain the Upper Hand in Chess 

The link below really helped too.  I just dont have the desire to stick to it as rigidly as youre supposed to.  But the courses are really good, and the plan works. 

http://chessok.com/?p=21207

One thing that will help you the most is to train against stronger players as often as possible and play rated tournament otb chess as often as possible .  

Thank you that helps a lot.

Thank you Reb sounds like my next weekend is planned!

Bump ^^ Just to see if anyone else has any other interesting ideas.

Just play.

Learning is over-rated. At least 60% of your chess activity should be playing.

The rest is not neccesarily puzzles. I actually suggest to have 30 minutes easy tactics solving session a day. That's enough.

I can also suggest watching Super GM games (without deep analysys, just 3 minutes per game). Watching Carlsen's and Karpov's games is great, as they are "grinder" type, so your pattern reckognition and planning will improve alot.

Learning openings with chessbase is also important.

It is possible to play too many rated games. I think I might have been doing that this year. Make sure you analyze all your games and put 100% effort into your tournaments.

It's difficult to say without seeing your games what holds you back. However, improving calculation is almost always useful. You can solve puzzles in mixed mode on ChessTempo for this.

Thanks for the suggestions.

This is a recent game I played. Is it possible from this game to guess what my weaknesses are? If not I will be more than happy to include more games. Thanks for your time!

Wow, thanks for the helpful insight Alex!

arod summed it up best.  If you truly want to reach 1700-1800 you are going to need a firm understanding of how to formulate a middlegame plan, how to play the middlegame, and how to play the ending.  

These are some of my favorite chess books and would probably be good for you:

• How To Reassess Your Chess (I have the 3rd ed.) by Jeremy Silman
• The Art of the Middle Game by Alexander Kotev and Paul Keres
• Think Like A Grandmaster by Alexandder Kotov
• Currently I'm also reading Attack and Defense by by Mark Dvoretsky and Artur Yusupov

Then I'd say if you're reading books the other thing is to do tactics, play lots of slow games (anything between G/30 and correspondence), build your repertoire, and so on.

What skills does it take to be 1700-1800. Quite a few. You probably have some of them, but not all of them. Study your games for weaknesses.

I personally take a piece of paper with several categories (opening, ending, calculation, evaluation, planning, tactics, positional understanding, time management, and psychology) and look through 4-5 recent OTB tournament games. Each time I come across a move(s) where I was uncertain of my play, I'll put a tally mark next to one or more of the categories related to my mistake/uncertainty. After you've finished you should have an idea where you need to improve, and can make a plan based on this. Then repeat it every so often.

whatever others say, its not hard when you study the right sh it. Dont focus on openings, play d4 and some solid sh it. Read strategy books and do tactics every day. Important to play many tournaments and analyse your games and where you played sh it. After this you should be 1700 easiely. Takes maybe 3 months.

Go over your games with a player who is stronger than you. Eventually their way of looking at things will rub off on you and you'll be able to recognize good ideas much more quickly in your own games.