Help improving (~1000) blitz rating.

I have been stuck around 1000 blitz rating for a while with highest rating approximately 1075. I have started recently trying to use same openings for more rapid improvement (English Opening & Two Knights Defense). What would you recommend to quickly go from ~1000 to ~1200 blitz rating? Thank you!

If all you want is quick improvement then there will be some stop gap methods. Eventually the answer is "improve your normal chess to improve your blitz." Ok with that disclaimer out of the way:

Learn a solid system and play it every game. This will allow you to play quickly in the opening and spend most of your time in the middlegame. Even better if it lets you do a paint-by-numbers type of attack. I'm thinking like a stonewall or london.

In general lower rated players capture too much. If your opponent isn't forcing you to capture then just ignore their move and look for one of your inactive pieces (especially a piece on the back rank) and improve its position.

Tactics always help. Solve some puzzles every day if you can. Always review the puzzles you missed. Even better if you review them again a few days later.

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This next tip may be useful but it's less general.

 

I see you thought for almost 2 minutes before moving Qb3, so this tip's main purpose is to help you save time.

Whenever it seems your opponent is going to win something and you can't stop it, and maybe you feel a bit desperate, the type of move you're looking for is a threat (or check).

It helps to start with the big ones. Can you play a check? Well, no (QxB+ makes no sense).
Ok, next biggest is a queen threat. Can you threaten black's queen? Yes you can, with Nc3.

Now a line like Nc3 Qc5 Nb3 Bxa4 Nxc5 Bxc5 Nxa4 might be too hard for you to calculate, but since it's desperation time you're forced to try something and hope it works out. What I'm getting at is not finding Nc3 after almost 2 minutes means you probably were calculating random things instead of looking for the biggest threats you could make.

Now the move you did play, Qb3, takes advantage of the fact that after black captures your knight b7 is undefended. That's a nice concept even if it didn't work out in that position, so that's pretty good, but if you remember to look for big threats to wiggle your way out of a mess I think it could help you save time.

Thank you for the tip(s)!

1) Play more. If you have breaks week long it's not good for your performance. After the game try to figure out your mistakes and understand what exactly you should do in order not to make same mistakes on future. If you can't do that yourself ask for the help of stronger players/coaches. You should learn from you mistakes. This is the key point.

2) Solve tactics every day. If you failed puzzle, again, try to understand in what direction you should look in order to make it right. What is defect in your thinking system which don't allow you to find correct moves. Sure, sometimes you just simply don't know patterns.

3) Learn from strongest players. Watch educational videolessons on youtube. I can suggest Saint Louis chess club channel. Also you can look at channels of John Bartholomew and Simon Williams (longer games and educational videolessons).

It led me from 1000 to 2000+ in few years. Good luck for you as well

I noticed you are trying to play the same thing no matter what your opponent does. If you want to do that then you should use a system based opening like the London system, however, in my humble opinion, beginners should stay away from system based openings. The goal when learning opening principles is to find out how and when to capitalize on your opponents blunders. You can’t always do that when you play moves by rote, which is what most system based beginner players do.

I noticed you sometimes play the nimzowitch defense , or the alekhine defense, depending on what your opponent does. I don’t see any time in your recent history where you played the two knights defense. The thing is, without the e4 e5 push, your opening is simply not the two knights defense. Of course when your opponent plays d4 you play a two knights tango, which is suppose to be a decent opening, however, you seem to be having trouble with it.

Perhaps you should work on what your weak at, your response to a d4 opening. I would get a database and go over master games played in that opening. Chess games has a free database you can use for this purpose.

^ what this guy said is what my friend suggested as well. He’s 1300 trust me I know the struggle. Good luck

Play solid openings and don't spend too much time on theory or openings, endgame and middlegame are way more important at your level to get to 1200+ also analyze your games and learn from mistakes.

Maybe (I suggest) watch yt videos: Like this is a video about the reti opening:

Thanks Daybreak57 I will work on response to a d4 opening and capitalizing on blunders instead of moves by rote...

You've played ~300 Rapid games, but 2323 Blitz games.

My advice is, if you want to improve, QUIT playing Blitz until you're much more experienced. You really don't learn much by practising playing rushed chess. Playing just a handful of 30-minute games per day will make you a better chess player, and that will make you better at Blitz.

If you *really* only want to improve your Blitz rating, then my honest answer would be to learn some nasty openings like the Danish Gambit, which can let you trip up less experienced players. But, in the long run, you'll hit a wall with that, because it's not the way to become a better all-round player.

I have been over 2400 blitz and here are my thoughts:

- people overstate the importance of openings a lot. You can rely heavily on theory and this can be effective in blitz - or playing some system type opening and then auto playing the middle game plans etc but mostly you just need to play sensible moves and get a decent position all the way up to eg 2500. 
99% of it comes down to playing quickly (less vital if increment) having decent positional understanding but mostly just being ultra sharp with tactics. Up till GM level blitz usually the player who is best at tactics will win. The amount of games you will win from a clever tactic are much higher than from solid positional play eg slowly rounding up an IQP that you may be able to do in classical. I have also played GMs who are much better players but can lose due to the clock so time management is crucial - especially in like 3+0
finally the important thing is only playing games when you in the right mindset. If e.g. you aren’t tired from work and you have a big screen and fast mouse and fully focussed you will win so much more games than playing on your phone while on the toilet for eg. You can lose so many points quickly by going on tilt and playing when in the wrong headspace - eg like online poker. Therefore if you can limit yourself to playing when you have a good chunk of free time and can devote your full mental effort you will have a much higher rating. 

Dear Chessuppes,

I am a certified, full-time chess coach, so I hope I can help you. Everybody is different, so that's why there isn't only one general way to learn. First of all, you have to discover your biggest weaknesses in the game and start working on them. The most effective way for that is analysing your own games. Of course, if you are a beginner, you can't do it efficiently because you don't know too much about the game yet. There is a built-in engine on chess.com which can show you if a move is good or bad but the only problem that it can't explain you the plans, ideas behind the moves, so you won't know why is it so good or bad.

You can learn from books or Youtube channels as well, and maybe you can find a lot of useful information there but these sources are mostly general things and not personalized at all. That's why you need a good coach sooner or later if you really want to be better at chess. A good coach can help you with identifying your biggest weaknesses and explain everything, so you can leave your mistakes behind you. Of course, you won't apply everything immediately, this is a learning process (like learning languages), but if you are persistent and enthusiastic, you will achieve your goals.

In my opinion, chess has 4 main territories (openings, strategies, tactics/combinations and endgames). If you want to improve efficiently, you should improve all of these skills almost at the same time. That's what my training program is based on. My students really like it because the lessons are not boring (because we talk about more than one areas within one lesson) and they feel the improvement on the longer run. Of course, there are always ups and downs but this is completely normal in everyone's career.

I hope this is helpful for you. Good luck for your chess games!

I put some relatively straightforward ideas in a blog Improve your blitz results in eight steps - Chess.com