i have been playing chess for months, and i am still below beginner ratings.

i have been playing chess for 4 1/2 months and i still cant even budge 600 rating, i blunder obvious moves or sometimes just throw a piece to the enemy for no reason. i always miss calculate exchanges and end up losing a knight/pawn. what is wrong with me?

Since I'm not the highest rated player out there, take everything I say with a grain of salt . However I think you should work on your tactics which I see you have been doing, good start! However, you're only doing like 5 tactics a day. I recommend doing more tactics, perhaps 15 a day. To make it more manageable, I recommend gradually increasing the amount (do 1 the first day, 2 the second, 3 the third, etc.) so it doesn't feel as arduous. I also recommend spending more time thinking when doing tactics. I noticed that in most of the tactics you got wrong, you spent less time on them then the average person who attempted the puzzle. I also recommend doing lessons (perhaps start at "From Beginner to Winner" as those cover fundamental chess ideas. If you do these things and keep playing longer time control games as you have been doing (make sure to take your time on those games!) , I think you will get better soon. Hope this helps!

P.S. Nice username!

i try and do tactics on l****ss, im to stingy to pay hehe. but ive been slacking recently

I don't blame you  I forgot that basic members can only do 5 puzzles/day.

sensor the competitor site (L****ss) or the mods will mute you

Mentioning a competitor website on chess.com is the equivalent of cursing in public forums... I digress.

You've only been playing 4 1/2 months. Come back after 4 1/2 years.

yeah, 4 and a half months isn't that much. If you keep practicing, you probably are going to get better.

Tactics will help improve your board vision

Dont worry if you can only do 5 a day. I do roughly 5, everyday, and my tactics rating has steadily improved from 400 in january to 1400. The trick is to solve the tactics in your head before making any moves. Aim to get them right first time. Ignore the clock. At low tactics ratings this will seem trivial as they are simple pattern recognition problems but as they get harder you will need to calculate the moves in your head. What this is doing is improving your ability to calculate and visualise moves and then evaluate the position before it appears on the board. If you can strengthen this skill it will reduce blunders, tempo losing moves, etc. Little and often tactic puzzles are a great way to do this and at the same time improve your tactical vision.

thank you for all of the help everyone

A forum with an almost identical premise was posted yesterday with the same premise so after looking through your games, there seems to be the same problem, so I shall just copy my answer to Nimble and post it here.

At this moment you seem to be in what I call the "second stage" of the beginner stage. You know how to move your pieces, you understand the rules, and can see where pieces capture and can be captured. But just barely. 

Luckily for you, this second stage is quite easy to get out of. You're in that 700-1000 rating and the only thing you need to learn to improve from this stage is how not to blunder in chess. You don't need plans, strategies, or grand tactics. All you need to do is not blunder and learn how to take advantage of opponent blunders? What do I mean? When I looked over your games, I saw that there were pieces hanging on both sides as early as move 4. That is unacceptable. A piece so early is a death-sentence and if you can learn to avoid these, you will see a massive spike in improvement instantly.

How do you do so? You ask yourself these two questions after every move your opponent makes, and after every move you are about to move. Ask yourself.

1. What is my opponent doing?

2. Is my move safe?

These two questions may seem simple, and you scoff at it's ability to catapult over 1000 rating, but if you're not, I can assure you, you are not doing it properly. When I say every move, and every single one of your moves, I mean EVERY single one. Do it until you don't want to do it anymore. Do it until it's so engraved into your mind that you no longer need to ask yourself these two questions. That is how you improve. This video over here explains these two topics and some other strategies to get you over 1000.

2 Questions to Push You Over 1000 Rating (and more!)

The third stage of beginner-hood is where I see many people get frustrated and quit the game, or just get stuck and can't seem to get by. They seem massive spikes of improvement when they are first beginning and have fun, but after some time of being stuck, they think that chess isn't the game for them. But that's just bollocks. If you ever see yourself getting to this point, make sure to dm me for future advice, as I've helped many people get past this stage.  It's hard, but it's definitely doable for anybody who puts in the hard-work.

This hyperlink sounds like the perfect resource for you then. By following these principles and a little work, most anyone can reach 1000+ rating after some time

https://www.chess.com/blog/KeSetoKaiba/opening-principles-again

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I love National Master Sneakiest_Of_Snake's reply.

In particular: your goal to get past the 700-1000 rating range is just to stop hanging pieces. That's it. Don't worry about anything fancy like opening theory, endgame theory, middlegame strategy, cool tactics like forks, pins, skewers and clearance sacrifices.

Just focus on making "safe" moves (ie. moves that don't directly hang a piece). And learn to capture your opponents' hanging pieces. That alone will get you to 1000+ rating.

Here's a puzzle for you. White to play. What do you do?

Thank you for the reaffirmation but it's definitely true. Stop hanging pieces and your rating will increase magically to 1000+. Only when you are sure you won't be hanging pieces should you focus on other topics.

It's more than that. As someone stuck under 500. Just playing safe and not hanging pieces will not give you the win ratio you need to improve. I have recently been playing 76-90% accuracy, like a 800-1200 rated player. However, my opponents do the same more often than not. I do get an easy win from super noobs here and there. It's just not enough. What I noticed is if you don't have a checkmate plan or a good idea on tactics you will lose MOST of the time and not reach 700-1000. You can't just play without blundering without any purpose behind your moves, or an end goal. I only started to feel like I'm playing better after I started to understand how openings work and how they are used to gain advantage. A lot of people in my level (at times, but not always) will use cheap tricks to win that are not obvious to new players. I have seen people play crazy openings like bong cloud at my level. Find two good openings, one for white and one for black. Study them and understand WHY and how they give you advantage and how to exploit your opponents weaknesses. This is the only way. Saying "just don't blunder" is bad advice. It's more complex than that. That advice gave me black and white thinking for so long and caused me to just protect pieces "hoping" my opponent screws up. Most of the time they don't always screw up. The most my opponents blunder is 1-2 times. More often than not the engine shows 0 blunders for my opponent.

I looked at a couple of your recent losses. In one, you allowed a back rank mate when you were far ahead in material. In the other, you hung your queen after missing that your opponent had hung a piece and a queen on the two previous moves.

Here are some suggestions. 
1. Stop playing blitz. As a beginner, you don’t have enough time to check your opponent’s threats. 
2. Read about basic opening principles. These need to become automatic before you can play speed chess. 
3. Look at some books on how masters think. This will help you form plans. 

in general, I think your time is better spent to read, study, learn about chess principles than it is playing speed chess against other beginners. If your goal is to become a better chess player, then playing blitz against other beginners is a waste of time.

#1 not strange when you literally played 212 games over 4.5 months