Increasing 200 ELO in a month

for me improvement always comes in bursts. i can get to a rating i've never been before only to have it drop ~100 points a week later. for getting past 1600 i can highly recommend you to play longer games (i almost exclusively play 10/0), analyze games, do tactics and what helped me a fair amount is watch lectures on youtube (chess club and scholastic center of saint louis, john bartholomew and chess24 are my favorite channels).

 

Me too! I've had ups and downs, but now it seems to have settled in the 1400's. I'll try longer games, and funny you mention those channels, I used to watch them a lot but I can appreciate them a little more now than before! Shame I don't have as much time. I can also recommend agadmator if you haven't seen him before, very entertaining. John is also great, and now that Magnus is on chess24 it's truly remarkable. Thanks!

I can also recommend agadmator if you haven't seen him before, very entertaining. John is also great, and now that Magnus is on chess24 it's truly remarkable. Thanks! I'm sorry, but I really hate agadmator and his superficial "analyses". All he does while "analyzing" is to give 1 or 2 engine lines without providing any insight to the positional aspects, pluses and minuses and ideas of certain moves. He is just too big a patzer to provide quality analyses and i don't understand why he has so much hype, while top-analyses by peter svidler, sam shankland or even jan gustafsson have almost no views compared to his. I appreciate that he promotes chess to a wider audience tho.