please hey am I still stuck at 500 elo?

At 500 rating you should:

- do some puzzles, especially before you play, both to put your mind in "chess mode" and to learn common chess patterns. Ideally daily.

- play slow time controls (until you hit about 1000) like rapid 15|10, once per day, or whatever regular schedule you find convenient.

- analyze the game you played so you know what errors you did so you can actually improve over time.

- And maybe learn the most basic endgames (queen, rook, two bishops, king opposition / single pawn)

- If you can also find the time to watch one of GM Naroditsky's speedrun videos on YouTube every day in sequence, that too should help you a lot.

- The usual, do blunder checks, follow general opening principes, pay attention to the time control, etc

Dear GeddyFisher,

I'm a certified, full-time chess coach, so I hope I can help you. Chess is a really complex game and it's important to be persistent and keep practicing not only for days but weeks, months to jump a level. Everybody is different, so that's why there isn't only one given way to learn and improve.

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 analyzing your own games. There is a built-in engine on chess.com which can show you if a move is good or bad but the only problem is that it can't explain to you the plans, ideas behind the moves, so you won't know why it is so good or bad.

In my opinion, chess has 4 main territories (openings, strategies, tactics/combinations and endgames) and 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.

If you would like to learn more about chess, you can take private lessons from me (you find the details on my profile) or you can visit my Patreon channel (www.patreon.com/Bgabor91), where you can learn about every kind of topics (openings, strategies, tactics, endgames, game analysis). There are more than 19 hours of educational videos uploaded already and I'm planning to upload at least 4 new videos per week, so you can get 4-6 hours of educational contents every month. I also upload daily puzzles in 4 levels every day which are available with a FREE subscription.

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