how do i get my rating up fast?

It will be near impossible to get your rating up quickly later when you're around 1800+, unless you're a prodigy, but at your level, the best thing to do is do tactics, play a good amount of games, and perhaps study a few beginner books.

There is no foolproof way to guarantee a quick rating rise - for it depends on competitive results. All we can do is help you improve your game, and hopefully the competitive results will follow.

There are a few ways to improve your game at that level. Some have already been stated, such as lengthening your time control and playing more often.

Those should work fine, but I also recommend solving puzzles on the Tactics Trainer or from a book. Even just a few a day will help sharpen your tactical vision and, consequently, lead to you seeing more on the same chessboard.

And one more thing: Analyze your long games after you're done with them and see if you can find recurring mistakes. If you can, eliminate them!

I am approaching 1800 OTB now, and I really need a way to get my rating up-5 hours of tactics the week before the tournament is not helping. So tactics trainer does not work that much for me. Any effective way? I have been this level for a darn good time.

Not sure why kindaspongey keep spamming those lists. You can literally google "good (beginner) chess books" and find much more information about it. I admire kindaspongey efforts, but it's kinda redundant.

 Your story is one of the older known mistakes of beginners. The first thing good teachers do is protect their students from 2 things:

1) Playing blitz and

2)Study openings

   Not because you don't improve with them , oh no , of course you do. Mainly because they offer short term improvement  while they actually do a lot of long-term damage that varies from player to player. It's what they call high-cost improvement.

    Everything you do in chess has a cost. If you think you can improve with blitz as much as someone that plays long games and tries to calculate and plan as deep as possible , you are only fooling yourself.

    Here is what a great teacher says about speed chess in general(even rapid):

Annotating rapid games (those played with a reduced time control) and, even more so, blitz games, is a fairly pointless exercise. It is not even about the almost inevitable abundance of inaccuracies and crude blunders – there are sometimes enough of them in serious "classical" games (although, in general, a significantly lower number). What's more important is the complete absence in rapid chess of any interesting, deep ideas that can only be created through immersion in a position, for which there simply isn't time in a speed game. (its a copy paste ,someone told me this and that was the point when i stopped playing blitz)

I guess I will start going to the local chess club more often, since I stopped 3 months ago and since then, my rating went down slightly

If you want I am giving a free lesson, I am over 1900 on blitz, just message me

"... This book is the first volume in a series of manuals designed for players who are building the foundations of their chess knowledge. The reader will receive the necessary basic knowledge in six areas of the game - tactcs, positional play, strategy, the calculation of variations, the opening and the endgame. ... To make the book entertaining and varied, I have mixed up these different areas, ..." - GM Artur Yusupov

If I could recommend only one video to beginners, this would be it:



As soon as you stop giving away free material (and pick up any free material opponent leaves on the board), you should get to 1000+ rating easily.