Why am I not improving??

Why are you not improving?

It could be a number of different things. Are you analyzing your games after you play? Are you reading chess instruction books? are you a diamond member on chess.com where you get free instructions and a lot more awesome tools this website offers? Or do you just play every day or a few games a week and expect to suddenly get better? 

Chess is a very difficult game and you must put in the time to study classic games and see the reasons behind every move. There are plenty of books out there for beginners but honestly the reason you are not improving is most likely because you are not studying the game and trying hard enough.

How old are you? If your brain hasn't yet fossilized, you still have hope.

Oh dear! Lunatics are in abundance here....Carry on chaps.

I think if you're stuck you really have to ask - what am I doing now to improve, because it's not working?

I took the advice of tactics,tactics, tactics when I was trying to go from 1150 to 1200+, and it really didn't work despite some pretty hard work on my part. I'd have the rare game where I'd have a nice tricky combo finish, but most of my games were lost in nonexciting manner, with no chances for me to use those tactical skills I'd spent so much time practicing.

I changed up my study approach (in frustration) and started trying to memorize annotated games. I've never reached a point where I can reproduce a full game with sidelines from memory (not even close, actually), but wow - this made ALL the difference. 

I think what this method does is highlight the areas where you are weakest, since you will have to spend more time reviewing those sections of the game to memorize/understand them. So it by nature addresses your weaknesses, even if you don't know what they are yourself.

It also corrects 'tactics-brain' which is what I think most players stuck where I was at 1150-1250, have. They're looking for tactics,tactics, tactics, but routinely make small errors with basic moves that sound like "stupidly obvious I know that already stuff" like claim open files, don't move the same move twice, develop undeveloped pieces, but I can guarantee that they make a lot of those - most of the players I play who are 1400-1600 (on 5-min blitz here) still make a lot of those errors, but make very few gross tactical errors.

Until you dramatically reduce those 'quiet' errors (and they're not hard to fix, esp ifyou go through annotated games), you'll have a hard time even with good tactical acumen.

I also think trying to memorize it is a pretty failsafe way to go. I know some folks here will say 'you don't understand, you're just memorizing', but I don't think that's accurate at all. You memorize the refutations/sidelines, you are learning concrete examples to reinforce understanding. Furthermore, there are quite a few situations in chess where you just have to memorize it to get the best line.

Hard work is required, but in chess in particular, I think you can make the mistake of directing a lot of hard work to the wrong area. In particular, a lot of raw beginner players (<800) do the right thing when they start, and make huge fast gains studying tactics, tactics, tactics, but then stall out when they expect that same study strategy to continue gaining them points at OP's level (1200ish).

In contrast, if your study is directed to your problem areas, it can take dramatically less work to have a substantive impact on your rating. Again, I do think that in the absence of a coach who can pinpoint your problem areas AND provide effective ways to improve them, studying full annotated games is one of the best ways to naturally get at this.

Tactics is actually the easiest skill to get 'up to par' for your rating. Most lower-rated players at OP's (or my) rating, lose a lot of games due to a late-game tactical oversight and blame it on 'I keep hanging pieces', when in reality, they were making small positional and development errors repeatedly that made it not only possible, but sometimes easy to blunder in an inferior position. So the big error isn't 'hanging pieces', but allowing such a position to arise in the first place, and studying more tactics will only make a minimal difference in preventing these 'blunders'.

http://www.chess.com/livechess/game?id=1246627550

Taxman won in 0 moves. The opponent resigned at the sheer terror of his chess knowledge. I've seen the error of my ways. Please have mercy on me.

I own a newly formed mentoring group (Socrates Relearned)

We play unrated practice games among ourselves, and discuss them freely in our Kibitzer's Forums.

We are very friendly, helpful and nurturing - you could do worse than checking us out

Thanks for offer can you send me invite or how can I join