Realistic improvement expectations

Hey everyone.

My question is simple: what is a realistic amount of improvement to expect for a willing, dedicated chess player who has the time to study and work hard at it.

I've read threads about people starting too late in their lives not going to be able to get far in chess. I've started seriously less than a year ago, at age 20.
I've also read about people wanting to achieve a title in such and such amount of time and being laughed at for having such unrealistic expectations. This thread is not about that. It's me being curious about what an "average joe" like me could achieve, because there are undoubtedly a lot of people like me out there.

As an example, I do the following things:

-Play in a tournament each month
-Play at a club each week (long time control)
-Play a (few) games of 30 minutes p.p.p.g. on live chess a few times a week.
-Do 30 minutes-1 hour of tactics problems every day on chesstempo
-Analyze own long games by yourself and with stronger players
-Study How To Reassess Your Chess by Silman and Nunn's Endgame book.
-Watch youtube chess vids (more for fun, but they are often very educational)

I've seen my rating improve on chess.com due to my effort. However, when my first Dutch national rating came out, it was 1270, which is way off from what I have here. It was even somewhat dissapointing.

I know there must be people on here who have been in my shoes some time ago, or are now. Could you share your thoughts?

Shameless self-bump

First of all, I've just started chess at 29, 1 month and a half ago. My goal is to be able to have a chess.com rating bigger than the average (now it's 1160) and a tactics rating of 1500 (chesstempo).

Here are some guidelines: 1 and 2

Thanks, I love Heisman's articles. His writing style really speaks to me, it's always clear and gives you some concrete goals to work at/with.

Thanks Estragon, as I was writing my original post, it did feel like a bit of fretting over meaningless numbers. Especially since I only have 8 rated OTB games in, meaning that the main source of rating points was a tournament in which I could have easily either underperformed or overperformed.
People also advize to play against stronger opponents to learn from them, so maybe I should expect to get beat up a lot.

Hey Macros!

It looks to me like you are doing MANY of the most important things as it pertains to getting better at the game at a very early stage in your chess "career". I remember myself piddling away a year or two studying opening manuals before I realized I wasn't getting any better, so it sounds to me like you can expect to improve much quicker than I. I'm not familiar with the Dutch rating system, but I remember going from 1100-1500 USCF in about a year after doing some proper study. All I did was solve custom tactics sets on ChessTempo. Just keep playing, learning your openings more thoroughly (AS YOU GO not studying them too much unless you are trounced by a certain line etc.) and you're going to be 200+ points stronger in a year at your stage I'd suppose. Mind you the points get harder as you go up, but I think you can make some good progress given your plan and current level.

I started at age 17 (a few months before my 18th birthday) in my state's Junior Open and had a provisional rating of around 1150 after about 5 games.  I have been playing competitively for less than two years and my rating is about 1550 but my estimated playing strength is probably higher (I have drawn and beaten class A players).  If you stay on a pace of 200 points per year for the first few years (obviously it gets harder to improve the higher you go) you should expect to make NM at some point. Only if you stay focused, but it is possible.

It's also possible to win the lottery.

This is exactly where I do not want this thread to go. It just becomes a flame war of "can" and "cannots". I wanted to hear people's real life experiences and expectations.

Thanks Silver Surfer, good to hear I'm on the right track.

1. Don't play blitz.

2. Play against higher rated players (higher than you but not so much higher that there's no competition because you'll probably end up getting extremely demoralized).

3. Study some strategy too - either by specific strategy books or studying the games of masters renowned for their positional play.

You seem pretty serious about this, best of luck 

Is that Kasparov?

last summer in just those 3-4months i went from 1215 to 1581 mainly by playing in every OTB tournament I could only entering my specified section (only 3 times did I play in stronger sections but just a class higher not the open section or anything like that) at home I actually didn't go over any of my tournament games as i can rember nor did I have a coach at that time but what I did do was go thru annotated games of other amatures and I had a sparring partner (1800ish back then) to play casuel games and do post mortem and I did dapple in a couple of tactical puzzels here and there when I found myself having more time but if you notice the one thing I did'nt do was STUDY MASTER GAMES and by all means even today I WONT I believe I owe much of my succes to study and playing people not more than say 3 to 400(rarely) above my own ratings then I feel that IF  YOU WANT TO BEAT A AMATURE STUDY him back when I was struggling between 1050-1180 all I did was study master games in terms of study and watch lectures by masters on masters and such and really that was really stupid of me cause simply in tournament play I DONT PLAY MASTERS I PLAY AMATURES people who dont follow the latest novelty in the grunfeld people who by the time the endgame was reached it was already clear who was winning so elite endgame recap was unessecary and ever since that leap from 1215-1581 i've neglected all of that till im playing at that level myself and just 6 months after getting that 1581 rating my rating jumped again to 1706 (what it is now) I haven't played since getting this rating but so far I placed 1st in every single tournament section I've entered since December of 2011 and i owe most of it all to my own philosphy of learning from the amature.

P.S. my next tournament is this weekend from here on out my goal is to reach 2000 before I graduate highschool and everyone around me agrees my future looks bright for that goal.

What works for one person may not work for another. I personally have learned a lot from Golombek's 'Capablanca's Best Games'.

Sounds like you are on your way to Chessmaster, chessmaster (this is why I'm not a comedian)! Good luck and thanks for sharing your story. I plan on seriously studying master games which have a similar playstyle to mine, but only after I stop making or not seeing my opponents tactical blunders every second game.

Thanks fey, for the success wishes.

To nylsel, the people in that picture are:

From the back ground left: Kramnik, Kalifman, Capablanca, Polgar judit, Smyslov, Steintz, Fischer, Anand, Petrosian, Tal, Botvinik. In the front from the left, Kasparov, Spassky, Bogoljobov, Karpov, Nimzovitch, Lasker

I am much older than those posting in this thread so far --64, yet my chess improves steadily. I am in the 1700s now and I hope to get to 2000 and beyond. I play some slow, serious chess each week and I use the tactics trainer here at chess.com daily. My rating on it is 1800+.

There is one thing I am doing though that gives me a huge advantage for improving my chess and competing in tourmanets -- living a CR Way lifestyle that promotes healthful neurogenesis. Here's a recent blog post about it:

http://calorierestrictiondietplan.com/uncategorized/brain-improvement-accelerates-when-regular-training-and-beneficial-biochemistry-are-combined/

I'm pretty much doing the same as you, macros. I started fairly late myself, around 20ish, and played short blitz games only for years. I have "rediscovered" chess fairly recently with slower, more strategical and positional games (as long standard or correspondence chess). I have improved pretty dramatically over the last few months, and right now my dream/ long term goal would be an "expert" rating, i.e. 2000 Elo OTB with tournament time settings.

Many threads have been started previously on this-that's why I wrote what I did. You could have looked them up, but you didn't.

If you had, you would see that my "joke" is no joke at all.

You can get to 2000, but you will not have much of a life aside from chess.

You're welcome for my summary.

Hi Macros,

At your age, you can still go very high : if you've just started competition chess one year ago, I don't think now is the right time to ask the question "how far can I go ?".

I'd suggest you follow your current regimen, play a lot of OTB rated games, get a coach if you can (there are tremendous coaches in the Netherlands !) and come back to ask this question in a couple of years. If you still love chess then, you'll have some good answers