Rating road block

I started playing chess around two and a half years ago, and I went to my first tournament almost exactly two years ago.  I was given a provisional rating of 1100, which was accurate.  after a few months, my rating jumped to 1300.  after a few more months, it went up to 1500.  A few more months, and it was at 1750.  It's been hovering around the 1750 to 1850 range for the eight months or so, and I haven't really made any recent progress.  I have already studied endgames in depth, so I know that's not what's holding me back at the moment.  Does anyone have any idea what a player in my rating range should study to improve their game?  Thanks for your suggestions.

You are now ready for some briliance, sacrifices, great tactic and such.

Sounds like you're in the same boat as me. When will the traffic lights turn green for us, eh, juggernaut? Let us wait and see what others have to say.

study openings

This is an interesting question. The road to improvement is not linear. Early on lots of studying of tactics, endgames and overall practice will improve your play quite a bit--going from 1300-1800 is a lot. However the next hurdles are much harder.

At the higher levels the winning of a game is much harder than just winning a  piece by some tactic. There is chess knowledge of the position, knowing when to transform a dynamic advantage into a more permanent static one. Knowing when to exchange into an endgame and when to avoid such exchanges. Also fighting spirit really matters.

Beating a master is very hard even when you are winning. They keep finding the toughest defense and you need to be alert on every move. Saving a lost game (or winning a drawn) game really adds points to your rating. Consistency is also key winning 3 and losing 2 is good when you are playing people 100 points higher than you but bad when playing people who are 100 points lower than you.

You also have to know how to play all types of positions, closed, open, gambit etc as you will be facing  people who are more prepared. Knowing your own openings is important but not memorizing tons of stuff. Also keep practicing. Perhaps hire a coach for a short term to help determine your weaknesses and he can give you exercises to address them.

Hopefully this helps somewhat. The next improvements you see will be slower and more modest if you keep at it but they will come. 

What's holding many people back is not lack of chess knowledge, but bad habits.

As your rating went up, some of the misconceptions you inevitably had as a 1100 survived and got reinforced (well, you got better while you had them), and now they're ingrained habits that are holding you back.

Who knows what they are for you -- choosing wrong plans, not calculating what needs to calculating, bad time management, could be anything.

To find out what the problem is, you need to analyze your games deeply. Why did you do certain moves, and how can you stop doing that? We can't do that for you, and books won't help either (although columns like Heisman's Novice Nook may give ideas on what could be going wrong).

Possibly drastically changing your opening repertoire forces you to see everything in a fresh light, allowing your improvement to continue. But I don't know about that.

That's kind of a classic place to plateau... you've hiked the easy part of the trail and the rest of the way is tougher. You need to use your intelligence to search out what it is you need to improve. Probe your game for its weaknesses and work to eliminate them. When you lose, why do you lose?

thank you for your comments I'll try to do what all of you suggested and hopefully it will help me get over 2000 sometime in the next year or two.

You might want to use this book to identify your weaknesses:

http://www.amazon.com/Chess-Exam-Training-Guide-Yourself/dp/0975476122/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251843537&sr=8-1