I need a plan, how can I become a good chess player?

Is the opening important?:  Yes
Is it common to spend too much time memorizing openings?:  Yes

How should the opening be studied?:  By learning its common midgame ideas, maneuvers, tactics, etc.

It's also common for a player to instinctively try to solve weaknesses in other areas (strategy, endgames, tactics) by looking for a new opening. Instead what they should do is learn more about all the other areas and learn more about the openings they already play.

Now... maybe an opening really is a bad fit for you.

Sometimes a coach will tell you "I demand you learn the Sicilian" or something like that... but you really hate those positions. Maybe you're facing tons of Yugoslav attacks and you really dislike those mid game themes. In that case you probably should switch... but when you do, stick with the new opening for at least a year. Sure you'll have to memorize the first few moves of the common lines, but what will really make it a good opening for you is looking over... lets just say 1 or 2 GM games a day, 5-10 minutes a game, featuring that opening. After a few months you'll have seen a few 100 games, and you'll know a lot of common ideas.

That's my take on it anyway.

There are now bunches of books intended to help with explanations of sample games.

https://www.newinchess.com/media/wysiwyg/product_pdf/7790.pdf

"... 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

 Member Since: Jan 4, 2018

736 Blitz games.

3 Standard games.

I seriously wonder why and how this question is asked repeatedly?  How it appears that someone can play nothing but blitz, and wonder what they either:

Arent improving?

How to improve?

Just want to make sure i saw that correctly???

$1100 for lessons?  Is that for a life time?

All it takes is 1 person to think someones is worth something.  This is why i no longer go to sporting events.  Im not paying $30 to park...$10 for A hot dog...$125 for a polyesther jersey...$8 for a soda.  To me?  Thats assinine, but to others its not.  Am i going to send some guy on chess.com $1100 for lessons? No...

"In 1 year youd be a GM."

Why am i having flashbacks to those TV infomercials where the guy is coming to your town, and for $250 he will give you the secrets to making millions in real estate/stock market.  But he needs $250...when he already hs millions...

Yeah bro, let me coach you, you'll be a GM in 1 year. Only $1000

Act now and I guarantee no money back.

Ill make you a GM in 1 year, for $900.

Call before midnight tonight, and ill throw in a set of ginsu knives.

Deflection...the last bastian of defense.

Everytime you post, you make it worse.

I'm curious. If someone studies hard , (has some talent) and in a structured manner, and has the time and commitment to dedicate themselves completely to chess,   why should they not reach GM level at any age? I don't think it's an impossibility. 

Same reason not everyone can be a pro musician, athelete, etc. Some kills are hard for humans. Anyone can be a world champ tic-tac-toe player, but for things that are hard for humans to be in the top 1% takes a perfect storm of aptitude, motivation, environment, etc. One of those things is age. You can't start chess at 50 and be a GM.

This is a lot easier to understand if you've ever tried to be good at something.

I did mention the need for talent. If someone has a flair for an activity that doesn't necessarily require physical fitness, are you telling me that if they devote themselves wholeheartedly to it for, say, 40 years, every day, they haven't got a good chance of reaching a very high level? BTW, I do know a little bit about learning and cognitive psychology, and am pretty good at a few things myself. Only took me 3 years to become a semi-pro tennis player. Less than that to become a Karate black belt. I think that if a very skilled and intelligent person took up chess at the age of 40 or 50, assuming they lived long enough, they should be able to reach a GM standard. 

Yeah, that's sort of how skill works. You don't keep improving for 40 years (unless you take long breaks). People who become GMs do it in less than 10... and of course plenty of people play their whole lives and plateau much lower than GM.

As for physical fitness... yeah, chess takes a young mind and body. Otherwise we'd never have world champions in their 20s (such as right now). And there are only 2 people older than 30 in the top 10. One of them is a former world champion (Kramnik)  https://2700chess.com/

I think you're massively underestimating what it takes to be a Chess GM, Celtic G. Not every intelligent and skilled child who takes up the sport early and trains manages to achieve that goal. Take Josh Waitzkin for example, a Chess Prodigy who drew against Kasparov at age 11. He's "only" an International Master - a very respectable title nonetheless.

To be a Chess GM, you have to be better than 99.7% of registered FIDE players. No-one who started Chess at 40 has ever become a Grandmaster. You're up against younger, fitter, more mentally agile players who have already been playing 20 years by the age of 25. Becoming an expert or simply a very good chess-player is a more reasonable goal and probably more equivalent to your black belt, semi-pro tennis player examples.

"BTW, I do know a little bit about learning and cognitive psychology"

Then you'll know that cognitive functions start slowly declining at 25 and that the peak age for learning chess is childhood. 

Well, there is such a thing as neuroplasticity. But if you believe that you start declining at the age of 25, then you probably will decline. :-)

Belief has nothing to do with it. I can tell from your posts that this isn't your field of expertise, so here's some peer reviewed and published articles on the subject if you're genuinely interested in learning about this topic:

1) "From early adulthood, there are declines in mental domains such as processing speed, reasoning, memory and executive functions."

2) "[S]tudies [...] converge on a conclusion that some aspects of age-related cognitive decline begin in healthy educated adults when they are in their 20s and 30s."

3) "Cognitive control peaks in the late teens and early twenties and declines with aging."

There's a reason seven out of the top ten Chess Grandmasters were born in the 1990s. Of course, there are always outliers and everyone declines at different rates: best demonstrated by the continued excellence of world number four Kramnik and world number 12 Anand (who will be 50 next year!).