how fast should a beginner expect to improve?

I recently started playing chess without any prior experience early in November. I like to do the puzzles and play the bots ( I haven’t been able to beat anything higher than Sven and Nelson) but don’t really know how to best improve. Do you have any tips for beginner improvement that don’t involve hours a day? What is a good chess rating for a beginning player? How fast should I hope to improve?

Just some practice on a tactics trainer and reading a book which gives a basic overview of the game would be a good low-maintenance way to learn and improve.

I used "play winning chess" by Yasser Seirewan. It's a short read, and gives a good overview of the game imo

Here are some general tips:

https://www.chess.com/blog/nklristic/the-beginners-tale-first-steps-to-chess-improvement

It is on you to decide on how much time do you have for chess, so in accordance choose how many games you will play, and what should be the time control. The longer the better, but if you have time for one 15|10 game every 2 or 3 days, so be it. 

If you wish to improve, try to avoid speed chess as much as possible.

I just started playing chess again, after years away from chess. I looked at the time it takes me to move when solving the puzzles. I take about 30 seconds to 2 minutes to decide on a move. I'm slow, I think.  Books with puzzles for mate in 1, 2, 3 and four are very helpful.

I have so far played 16,407 games as of today. I play just for fun. But, a few times, I have won over 2000+ rated players even though my ratings is below1200. The more you play, that much idea you get. And try to play as many as games in different types of chess like Bullet, Blitz, Rapid etc.  

It depends on the individual, so this question is redundant. 

None of us have any idea how naturally talented u are at chess, how long ur spending playing or studying, what ur brain processes are like etc. 

If u focus on whether ur meeting the status quo with things like growth and rating, u will end up hampering your play more than if u just focused on ur games and studied them. 

I always give the same standard recommendation of 3 books for all beginners:

1. Logical Chess: Move by Move by Irving Chernev has been one of the most recommended books for beginners for decades. There's a good reason for that. It'll teach you how to improvise your way through the opening, rather than playing memorized opening lines, which doesn't work at low levels when your opponents don't follow the master lines, and how to play with a plan.

2. Back to Basics: Tactics by Dan Heisman. Rather than just doing random puzzles on the internet, it's best to pick up a book with puzzles chosen for their instructional value. Chess Tactics for Students by John Bain was my first puzzle book of this type, recommended by Heisman back in the day, but that was before Heisman wrote this. Heisman's is better because it has a ton of other lessons besides just the puzzles, similar to his content from his old Novice Nook column on chesscafe.com (which unfortunately is now a pay site).

3. Silman's Complete Endgame Course by Jeremy Silman. Don't let the huge size of this book intimidate you. Every beginner needs to read the first three chapters. After that, put it aside until you reach intermediate levels and decide that you need to study endgames more. The way the book is organized makes it easy to just pick it up and learn some new stuff as you need it, rather than presenting you with all the information about a particular type of endgame at once, and making the reader work really hard to remember all the different variations.

I will suggest to pick 2 openings that you like. 1 for white, and 1 for black. Use the analysis tool they have here, and you'll learn the best moves for a given position. And play against human opponents. People often miss things or make mistakes.....computers don't.

So looks like 3 questions here:

1. You're going to have to put in the hours if you want to improve. Now, it doesn't matter whether you play 6 hours a day for 1 month, or 1 hour a day for 6 months - you should improve roughly the same amount in either scenario. So it's up to you whether you want to spread your learning out, or try to improve quickly by studying intensively. But it's going to take a lot of hours either way.

2. This is a really hard question to answer, because "good" is relative. What some people consider good, other people consider trash. But to give you some perspective: attaining a rapid rating of 1000 on Chess.com puts you in the top 50% of players, and 1500 puts you in the top 5% of players. You can decide for yourself what you think is "good".

3. This totally depends on how many hours you put in per day and how serious you are about improving (some people just want to have fun and don't care about fixing their leaks).

If you put in several hours per day and are really serious about improving, you can probably reach 1000 rating in 1 month and 1500 rating in 3 months.

If you put in a couple of hours per day and try to balance having fun vs improving, you can probably reach 1000 rating in 3-6 months and 1500 rating in 12-18 months.

If you only play a couple of hours per week and never study the game, you can probably reach 1000 rating in 2 years, and you'll probably never reach 1500.

So as you can see, it varies massively, depending on how serious you are. It's possible to play chess for years and be quite bad at it, or it's possible to only play for a few months and be highly skilled at it.

As a beginning player myself, I have found the following help get me up from 400 to the 700-800 range within a few weeks:

- Doing the puzzles
- Playing against a range of bots on the friendly mode, taking note of which moves played are good/bad/best etc
- Analyzing each game after it finishes, noting which mistakes/blunders I made and retrying to find a better move.
- Doing the chess.com lessons

I still make quite a lot of mistakes, though not nearly as many as before, so I think doing more of these same techniques will help me get up to 1000 or more over the next 2 or 3 months.

I also think it is useful to try all the different types of chess and find out which you enjoy most. If you enjoy all of them, play them all. If you like one/two type(s) most, focus on getting as good as you can on those.

check out John Bartholomews chess fundamentals series on YouTube and Gotham chess. They both have some very helpful stuff.

How fast do you want to improve?