How long did it take you to get you're rank?

Thought I was half decent at chess but I'm having a hard time staying above 900. I've hit a wall, think I've been playing to much but there is too much to learn it's daunting trying to study chess. My mindset is probably incompatible with chess. It only takes me 1 or 2 games where I dominate the entirety then make one mistake and get mated and go on tilt.

How long of playing online chess did it take you to get to your current rank?

How long did it take you to break a rank of 1000?

Read Logical Chess: Move by Move by Irving Chernev

Took me about 1.5 months to break 1000 USCF, from my first rated game.

About 2.5 months total to break 1200.

3.5 months to break 1300.

A total of 5 months to break 1400.

6 months to break 1500.

7 months to break 1600.

16.5 months to break 1700.

18 months to break 1800.

19 months to break 1900.

28.5 months to break 2000.

Hang in there, we all have times when we get stuck and can't seem to improve, it took me most of this year of work trying to break 2000 and I just couldn't seem to get the results no matter how well I played, and I was stuck in the 1600s forever too. If you keep at it, something will just eventually click and you will shoot up hundreds of points at once. Just work hard, study tactics, read some chess books, watch grandmaster tournaments, go over some classic games, play and analyze your games, and you will improve.

It took me about say... 132 months to break 2000 from 1900. (OK, I wasn't actively playing the whole time.)

But passing into 2100 was 15 months (and I didn't play in any tournaments for a year). Progress in chess is rarely uniform. If you like the game and put forth a reasonable effort to learn from your mistakes, you'll surely get better. Coaching can help you more easily find where you need to work. Logical Chess and tactics puzzles probably helped me rise from 800 to 1300 in a couple of years. If you are playing too much and you have a plateau, it might help to step back for a bit to reflect. You may have built some bad habits and are playing impulsively. This can happen at all levels. You might find some of Dan Heisman's articles and books helpful.

Today it is a lot easier to improve with computers. They can easily recognize tactical mistakes, but for strategic play human guidance is still important. If I am learning an opening, I will consult opening manuals and refer to master games in a database. It is helpful to find references that sensibly express strategic concepts clearly. If you already have a good idea of what types of positions you are seeking, you won't be as lost in the sea of variations. This is often characterized as positional understanding. Even if I am using a computer to analyze a position, I want to reach a point where I can describe the variations "in words" from a human perspective.

I notice you tend to play a lot of blitz. How do you deal with the time pressure? For me it's incredibly frustrating to lose when I know I could do much better if I had more time. Maybe stay off the blitz for the time being and spend the time going over some master games.

Three years, and still under 1000

At your rating, 99.9% of outcomes of each game are determined by tactics. So just study tactics. Nothing else. Tactics, tactics, tactics.

Then, when you reach 1000, study tactics, and then some more tactics.

At 1100, study some more tactics, and then some more tactics.

For how long it took me to reach 1000, I actually started there. In my first tournament ever, with only basic knowledge of opening principles and basic engames (I didn't even know what tactics were!), I got a rating of 991, which rose to 1068 in the next tournament.

But over the next 4 years, even though I was consistently playing in tournaments, I barely improved, ending up around 1200 at age 12. I then quit chess because I was progressing so slowly.

I now realize that the reason I barely improved is because all I was doing was playing chess; I did no studying. If I had spent time studying tactics puzzles instead of going to so many tournaments I have no doubt that I would have improved more.

I learned chess through home preparation and reading books, i was fascinated by the beauty of chess. My family thought i was a prodigy when i beat my father and elder brother easily without having them teaching me anything. But that was just hardworking and memorizing principles/tactics. After my first OTB tournament at 2009, it took me 6 months to sit at 1600 ELO and 1700 Chess.com Online here simultaneously. Everybody around me thought that i was very good and unbeatable(i always knew the truth, i wasn't anywhere close to a talent) until i played against someone really really good and started losing, and then i suddenly dropped to 1500 ELO and 1300 here and it stayed like that for 4 years. Now, I again bursted back at 1600-1700. I always watch the videos of Finegold, Seirawan, and read books of Seirawan and other people. I think if you don't consider chess as a professional sport and play for fun, you hit a wall around 1800 level and can't rise above that level. Exception for Bobby of course, he can stop playing for 20 years and still play flawless chess .

My confidence and will get shattered so easily. Not even sure I'll make it to 1000. Players above 950 just cruficy me if they know how to counter my random openings.

Bleh...

I'm at 1400 and i've been playing for about 2.5 months?

But I have been playing quite a bit. Probably 2-3 hours per day

Damn that's good... I guess some people are just better 

Not giving up just quite yet :P

don't blunder and learn openings

2 games? I can't remember.

Not too long.

Realize it's a long term game. Give yourself a couple of years and focus on one skill to put under your belt at a time and watch your play improve gradually as your strength grows.

For some examples:

learn the king and pawn vs. king end game positions.

Learn the common rook end games. (Rook games occur more frequently than any other, so you'll have it happen in more of your games and will win more as a result).

Drill the tactics trainer til it's coming out of your ears and you see tactics problems in your dreams at night.

Eventually you'll recognize some of the patterns as soon as you see them and instinctively make the right moves during your games because of pattern recognition.

Learn to calculate.

Memorize what color each square is. (There are only 64 squares, 8 letters and 8 ranks to choose from and only 2 different possible colors, so it's really not that hard.)

learn the first 10 to 20 moves of a solid opening for white 1.e4

and for black against 1.e4 and against 1.d4

Do the chess mentor on here as much as you can.

Get a membership and watch the videos.

I've only played about two years here, but I've already gained several hundred points from when I first started just doing those things above.

Pick out some of the stuff that has always been too "boring" but that you know you need to learn if you want to get better and do that stuff, whatever it is. Sometimes, it's that kind of stuff that gives you the biggest bump in strength in rating simply because it's things no one else really wants to take the time or effort to learn.

Have you tried the computer workout with different positions on here yet?

The videos from the masters in your Chess.com membership are a HUGE help.

Aside from the videos, the one thing that helped the most and quickest, was doing thousands of tactics.

I broke 1000 by learning tactics and some openings, sticking to one opening that I liked (which is what I was told by books/guides). You might also want to learn some endgame strategies sometime soon to give you an edge over people who have not yet studied the endgame.

what opening is that?

I'm having a hard time learning openings 

If you want something safe and not too difficult to learn, the Colle is not a bad choice. When I was around your level, I learned some basics of the Queen's Gambit by studying Logical Chess: Move by Move.