How do you improve?

Welcome fellow chessplayers. This question is deeper than it may seem at first glance. Being an entusiastic chess lover I've been searching for ways to improve for a long time and tried several methods.

Books. Books are really nice. However all the concepts are demonstrated through grandmaster games which are quite complicated. When I read a chess book I always feel like I was reading a book about building a simple, small house easily, putting brick by brick then the author shows me as an example how to build the Cathedral of Florence. Difficult to grasp.

Play "guess the move". This is another popular way of self improvment. Unfortunately the resources are quite limited. You will most likely miss a lot of moves in the beginning. You don't know why your candidate move is bad, and why the move played is better. Or is it? Afterall grandmasters are just humans like you.

Pick a position and analyse the hell out of it. How will it help me ? I'm a low level player I will probably come up with inferior moves in all variations. Does it help me to think about a lot of bad moves for a long time or just wates my time?

Tactics study + post game analysis. This combo seems ok. I've been doing it lately. However the games are full of mistakes at my level. Can I really learn from games which are decided by blunders and not by good play? Lets say I leave my rook hanging which makes me lose the game. So I say to myeslf ok this is the mistake don't leave your rook hanging anymore. Will I never do it anymore?

Currently I'm lost in that maze which leads to chess improvement.

I'm looking forward to your feedback. Tell us which method you prefer, how efficent is it. Tell us the story of your improving from beginner to strong player if you are willing to share.

Books are a big help, and you really only need to find one or two good ones to make a leap your rating.  At least, to get the basic devasting moves: uncovered attack, the fork, skewer, etc.  I'd seen quite a few chessgames but missed these things until an author illustrated same. Sure, a genius needs no books I guess.  But this is good advice for the rest of us.

If the book concepts aren't helping you much I would try watching better players play.  On ICC, I started watching GM's who play similar openings to me and am learning from their strategy, which has made me 10x more interested in books that research the strategy more in depth.  Along with this, I analyze every game I play immediately following the game and pinpoint the turning points of the game... Following my own examination, I check it over with a high end chess engine to see what I have missed, and try to learn from my mystakes.

In three months of doing this, I learned more than the three years where I was just playing and hoping that I would improve.  Hope this helps.

As for the books it sounds like you're trying to tackle ones aimed for players rated higher than you. 

Yeah, guess the move and self analysis aren't too useful when you're starting out... as you said you really don't know why your move is wrong or why other moves are good, it seems arbitrary..

Self analysis runs into the same problem, although posting to the analysis forum  helps you get ideas about why certain moves are good or bad.

Unfortunately (as well all know) knowing you hang a rook doesn't mean you'll never do it again.  That comes down to practice -- and make sure the games are long enough so you have plenty of time to try to avoid blunders.  There's no way to stop without practicing.

So chess improvement comes down to time and effort.  If you're not a kid with a coach and 8 hours a day to play chess (like most of us) then it can take quite a long time... but keep at it and when you look back year after year what seems hard now will somehow be fairly simple... at least when it comes to things like hanging pieces.

thanks for all the input :)

with books try this. just take a position a given book is analyzing. and set it up somewhere, decide which side you think is better and why and then force yourself to go through all variations you see as possibilities. then after doing this, look back at the book and see what it says. compare.

All well written, but a special Amen on that.  To that end, I am enjoying the heck out of the Tactical Trainer here at chess.com.  It is in fact, the reason I upgraded my membership - so I could play that in an unlimited manner. ;)