How to improve past 1800?

I recently crossed over 1800 rapid. I want to go on a training arc before returning to playing games consistently. But what is the best way to study and improve past this point? Here are some methods I have thought of. Let me know what you think is and isn't worth doing:

1. Start studying openings with the engine. Not something I was keen on doing in the past. I find memorizing chess lines tedious, and I only looked at a handful of openings with the engine. I will sometimes make purposely suboptimal plays early against some popular openings to avoid engaging in the mainline theory of those openings (I have never looked at how to play as white against the Sicilian with an engine or know any of the theory, still have a plus 50% win-rate against it). My opponents won't have intimately studied an opening I am winging on the spot. This something worth doing, or can you get away with not knowing any theory even in higher ranks?

2. Start grinding puzzles and develop better vision for tactics. I feel like I am pretty good at spotting tactics when it comes to attacking, but I miss a lot of defensive / resourceful tactics. I also tend to miss tactics that my opponent has available or is trying to set up. I am not sure what "theme" these types of tactics fall under, but it is something I need to get better at. I usually just do puzzle rush, anyone have better suggestions for how to develop better tactical awareness?

3. Actually start learning about end games. I only know some basic end game principles like opposition, and forcing the enemy king movement using zugzwang. If you were to show me a bunch of end games and ask me to explain why a position was winning or losing I would struggle. Because I have a played a bunch of games I have an intuition for weather an endgame position is better or worse for me, but I don't know what the rules are to evaluate if the endgame position is actually winning or not. I also don't know when the right time is to pull the trigger and trade into an end game, and my impulse is to avoid trading. There any good ways of learning end games? Do I actually have to read a book or something?

4. Learn what the hell positional chess even means.

@1

"what is the best way to study and improve past this point?" ++ Analyse your lost games.

"1. Start studying openings" ++ Useless.
What you study will not happen and when it finally happens you will have forgotten.

"can you get away with not knowing any theory even in higher ranks?" ++ Yes, up to IM level.

"2. Start grinding puzzles"
++ Puzzles are overrated. In a game nobody tells you there is a tactic or for whom.

"I usually just do puzzle rush" ++ Worthless.

"better suggestions for how to develop better tactical awareness?" ++ Analyse your lost games.

"learning about end games"
++ That is important. You have to know in advance what wins and what draws, and how.

"what the rules are to evaluate if the endgame position is actually winning or not" ++ There are no clear rules that always apply. You have to study endgames to grow some understanding.

"I also don't know when the right time is to pull the trigger and trade into an end game"
++ You trade when the endgame favors you.

"There any good ways of learning end games?"
++ You can practice with the 7-men endgame table base.

"Do I actually have to read a book or something?" ++ Yes. There are several good endgame books, e.g. Fundamental Chess Endings - Müller & Lamprecht

"4. Learn what the hell positional chess even means."
++ It is mostly related to endgames. Still good is My System - Nimzovich

Thanks for the book recommendations. Hard to find online resources that are appropriate for this level. Also good to know that I don't need to learn opening theory (thank god!).

https://www.chess.com/article/view/study-plan-directory

Use this study guide, It is really useful.

I really like blitz (3 min). It is why I started playing chess and have played it way more than rapid. I stopped playing it recently for a couple of reasons.

1. Mediocre wifi, will sometimes get disconnected for 10-20 seconds, which is enough to lose me the game. 

2. Use a touchscreen device and not a mouse and keyboard. Can't premove efficiently, which is also a problem in time scrabbles. It is also prone to misclicks when I try to play on it faster.

3. Tilt, I feel like I tilt way more in shorter time controls than longer ones. Maybe because it is possible to have way more consecutive loses in a shorter period of time if you play games back to back. The above two reasons also contribute to making some of my loses feel like BS. Had a bit of a gamer moment once after a series of loses, and decided to give blitz a break. 

I may go back to blitz in future after I improve in Rapid and have a proper PC set up with direct ethernet and a mouse.

My latest tilt has me still languishing in the 1700s after more than a week. I’ve got to stop playing Arena on Mondays.

Some anecdotes + personal opinions:

1. I also find memorizing engine lines tedious. In fact I am quite a lazy person - in otb games I simply move pieces in the opening and hopefully I'm not getting destroyed. Of course this does not mean I did not study openings - In fact I enjoyed studying openings, just not opening theory. I experimented with many different openings before settling on reti and KID/Sicilian.

On a side note, while I'm sure you don't NEED to learn theory up to IM level (as what tygxc said), it is unnecessarily limiting to yourself. If you can play chess well enough to the point where you're almost an IM, but you don't know much about openings, I would wager that simply learning about openings would help make that jump to IM, no?

2. When I was approximately 1800 online, I definitely did a lot of tactics. My tactics rating was OK, about 2600, and I stayed there quite some time even after I got to about 2000+. But yes, I did spend time on tactics every day. Nowadays I don't, though, only the occasional puzzle to make sure that I'm not regressing.

You mentioned that it is difficult to spot defensive resources, and to be honest it is the case for most people. I had to actually crawl out of a defensive mindset, because of the opening I used to play, the Czech benoni. In the czech, it was all about weathering white's attack so you could use your "more advanced queenside pawns" and "control over the e5 square" and "less space which means better endgame prospects" to win the game. Playing hundreds of czech games online and otb, over time I kind of just figured out how to defend - it's really hard to find defensive resources without the experience. 

3. Endgames are definitely a must. I remember when I was around 2100, when I realized that I spent too much time in the endgame... so I spent a month learning rook endgames from Silman's book so that I could play rook endgames faster in blitz. Maybe not the best motivation, but it hasn't hurt. It's important to know whether to evaluate an endgame as winning or not, and if you're unclear, to be able to tell which side is playing for a win and which side isn't. 

Example: I was playing an otb game vs a 1600 (I was rated 1970 at the time) when I lost an exchange. I could force a trade into an endgame where it would be knight and some passed pawns vs rook. I thought it would be slightly in favor of me, since I had a concrete plan with my pawns, so I went into the endgame and won.

I usually have trouble evaluating endgames, I miss many possible wins that might arise from it.

Example: 

4. I mean I wouldn't say it's necessary, but if you find tactics exhausting (as I did) then positional/strategical chess is the way to go. Being able to play certain pawn structures by knowing common themes and plans for both sides means that you don't need to know the opening to play the middlegame - and it is why I can play the KID and Sicilian without studying much theory. The book I would recommend for this is "Chess Structures" by Mauricio Flores Rios.

Thanks for the advice with examples B1ZMARK. Haven't ever heard of the Czech benoni, but looks very interesting. I am looking for new openings against 1. d4. I currently play the slav but the fact that my light square bishop never gets developed is getting annoying to deal with. I have also been losing a lot with it lately. Was looking into the Kings Indian as an alternative.

Good Positional Chess, Planning & Strategy Books for Beginners and Beyond...

https://www.chess.com/blog/RussBell/introduction-to-positional-chess-planning-strategy

https://www.chess.com/blog/RussBell

This might be an unpopular opinion but personally I think you play too many games you played twenty five 10 minute games yesterday.

Don't worry, I ain't going to be playing any games for a couple of months. I binge a lot of chess all at once, then take long breaks. Wanted to get over 1800 before giving it a rest (I know the numbers don't mean anything).

hi!

I am in the same place as you pretty much, getting stuck in the 1600-1800 rapid range

I myself have decided to put studying over playing.

Don't study openings with engine, study them with lots and lots of master games. Look over them somewhat quickly in order to grasp basic principles. 

Analyze lost games. Some people think its only that (such as @tygxc), but puzzles and learning openings is also good. 1800 is around when you actually have to learn some opening theory. 

Puzzles are important, but don't grind. 30 minutes a day is good.

Middlegame and endgame principles are also good, look at books. I would recommend Jeremy Silman's Reassessing your Chess and My System for middlegame (positional) work and the 100 endgames you must know for endgames. I don't recommend online puzzles, I use books. However, puzzle rush is alright to improve your speed for time scramble situations.

Analyzing your lost games is important too. Understand your mistakes and try not to do them over and over. But that is not the only thing. Everything above is also important, too. 

That's my advice. (btw do you have an over the board rating? it is helpful to know, because this is my usual training based on my 1900 USCF rating)

There is no need to be so afraid of cheaters, they are the ones who win games without deserving it, if you play with your own strength you have the satisfaction that you are gaining experience after each game. If someone cheats me in a game I won't be harmed by losing an online game against a cheater, I would only worry about security in tournaments, especially online where it is more difficult to discover them, but in non-tournament games I don't care running into cheaters matters so much (although I don't like it).
Anyway, cheaters will be detected sooner or later.

The more the elo rises, the cheaters are more hidden, for this reason it is possible to beat cheaters in some games, although it is true that they will win the vast majority of times. Among the most recent rapid games I played, I won a game against someone who I suspected was cheating, my suspicion was that he used a very strong bot with a certain "human" style of play, after a few days the player was already in the 2300 elo in rapids and his account had been banned. The guy couldn't really get very far, apparently he just racked up enough games to make it obvious that he was dealing with someone playing the moves of a bot, which obviously wasn't a chess engine, but a bot with an almost human style but that he was not human enough to convince.

Agreed. I used to get a lot of cheaters around 2100 rapid, and for a period of time I stopped playing rapid altogether... but then I noticed some of my friends, who I know are legit, get to 2200, and a couple to 2300 rapid.

I didn't think I was any worse than them, so I decided that it was more of a persistence issue than a cheating issue. If they could do it, then I could too. Took about a year, but I did improve my rapid. 

You could think of the cheaters as a training arc themselves - forcing yourself to play extremely consistent against those who are legitimate, and your chess will benefit. 

There are currently three ways to study openings:

1. Pay for one course of each opening you want to learn and play:
The online courses are based on combining the knowledge of expert players in each opening, but who in turn consult their knowledge with the help of chess engines. They do all the investigative work, you just have to learn a repertoire, constantly practice it until you master it. Some aren't even experts, but they did all the work to have the patience to review and organize every variation suggested by chess engines and consult games from professional players.

2. Make your own opening course personalized for you:
You are the one who is going to do the course, so you literally have to start from scratch, first you have to choose the openings and defenses that you think are best for you, then you are going to consult games, chess engines reaching analysis from 30 to 40 (or more) deep. You will have to do all the research yourself, you have to make a folder and organize it with even more folder for each line and variation where the pgn documents will be.

The idea is to make everything as organized as possible to make it more digestible and easy to learn. You can do it using only the chess engine, or you can do it against theory books or professional games; Using chess engines directly could be a recommended shortcut or not, that will depend on the abilities and knowledge of the person. If you're looking at books and games the job would be really hard, you might be better off just using the engine anyway; as of today stockfish is too good at analyzing openings, especially very aggressive openings.

3. Learn openings from your own games:
It is not exactly about copying what you did in your other games, it is about taking the good, discarding the mistakes so as not to repeat them, considering whether to change a poor movement for a more efficient one. This if you want it agrees with one of the first two options; In both cases the games will have deviations from the theory you studied, so learning to punish those unexpected deviations in case they are errors and if they are not errors you will have to find the best way to deal with these different ideas. You still do this with the help of the engine and it is as if the chess engine corrected the errors of your previous games and will recommend moves for your future games. In each rating people tend to repeat the same mistakes at different moves, so you might win a lot of games thanks to this.

The complicated part of the second and first point is that you can procrastinate if you do not concentrate on your goal, another problem is that you could change your mind about which openings to play, what I recommend is to choose very well before launching yourself to learn, for example, openings with 1.d4 or 1.e4, in both cases there are things that could bother you anyway, so avoid meaningless excuses to change openings (or defense).

Damn, that's a pretty intense training arc. Even in the lower ranks, you occasionally come across a cheater, but they cheat on every move. When I have a suspicion, I pick up the tempo a lot and have even won a couple of cheater games on time. Again thanks for the advice, best of luck with your games! 

I mean I was always too stupid to know whether or not my opponents were cheats or not so it never bothered me lol