Made it to 1100. Thank you.

Probably not a big deal for other people, but I was at one time ranked under 900. Yet with some help analysing my games from the community, I have been able to really polish up my play. I have made it to 1100. 

Most important pieces of advice:

1. Look at squares rather than pieces.

2. Don't make a bad move quickly.

3. Don't go for fast mates. A lot can be accomplished just playing solid blunder free chess.

Question: What rating does one need to achieve to be able to start competing in tournaments or clubs? I know 1200 is average, and that's where I am trying to get. 

1200 is the average at chess.com. Chess.com ratings tend to be a little bit higher than USCF or FIDE ratings.

Congrats on making it to 1100, I would like to make it to 1201, my highest rating so far, 970, then I got bumped back down to less than 800, oh well, I guess I will just keep playing, hopefully I will learn to play a better game. I know my game is better than when I started playing on chess.com.

Pushing for a break and stay at 1300 with another push for 14 myself! Keep it up =)

Keep the good work! It's the same for most of us I guess: trying to get better everyday. It's hard and it takes time but the results show up after a few months

Good job, keep it up. My next break point here is 1400. Looking forward to that day.

For your other question - you can start competing now. There is no minimum. In tournaments you would be paired with people in your rating group (which is provisional for a while). As far as the club goes, a club by me has tournaments and looking on the club page they are rated from 2159 down to 1042. Makes no difference, just don't get discouraged when you get beat. It will eventually come.

Congrats!With a little more play and study,ull soon make it to 1500!Remember to practise tactics more than anything.

I guess the biggest attitude change I went through was going from "Make a good move" to "don't make a bad move."

Good work. You can be ANY level and play real over the board tournaments. You should go ahead and start. I promise you'll become much stronger playing in real live tournaments. You'll enjoy it much, much more also.

Congrats :)

I have looked at one of your games to give you some advice.

But first of all: if you want to get higher, play stronger opponents. You can learn from that. Chances are bigger that you will lose, but you might also win and learn from winning and losing.

First idea how to improve: work on your tactics.

You're welcome

I play the game on a within 200 setting, so my opponents are random, but reasonable.

 In response to Loek. 4. was bad because I should've used the other bishop or the knight. 

5. was bad for him because after the exchange he has to place his knight on the wing or be down material.

9. I shoulve

9. shouldve played Bg6+

check out 21. I used that bishop check idea from move 9 on the above game.

Your first game: 4. Bd3 is bad because your d4 pawn hangs.

Your second game: Why is 4...Bd7 bad? Related to the next question, which is:

Why is 5...exd4 a blunder?

You could've played ...Nxf4 as early as move 13.

And a slightly more advanced point: If you look carefully, after 7 plies (3.5 moves) you have a French Winawer with reversed colours on your hands. The typical move is 4...e4 saving your pawn.

Your tactical awareness has a much greater chance of building up if you try to visualise as far as possible when selecting candidate moves. You might want to do (untimed, standard) tactics or play some correspondence chess to really have enough time over the course of a game to work on that. Although it's good that you're mainly playing 30|0 games on live chess.

Good job and hope you'll let us know when you hit 1300 :)

I still have work to do, but I'm a lot more solid than I was.

May I just add a reservation to "don't go for fast mates. A lot can be accomplished just playing solid blunder free chess"? Sometimes the blunder may be in not going for the fast checkmate.

In my last game I totally missed a mate in one or mate in two situation, or perhaps not so much that I "missed", as it was what I was planning, but my plans were blown because there was a counter attack that would also be a potential fast mate. Instead of doing the math and confirming that it wouldn't matter, could be safely ignored, I "played safe" just by adding an extra pawn in the diagonal to the king. I thought, "this definitely ruins that tactic, so I'll just do that out of precaution and I can calmly advance with the mate". But that lost tempo was all that was needed for an additional advance of a pawn from the other side, a single pawn that essentially made it become a whole "new" game, taking 7 more turns (and potentially many, many, many more, in the games I played against myself from there) to finish.

It wouldn't be so much of a big deal if it was a 5 minute blitz or something, but was 3 days per move and I still missed that, I can't believe it.

 One should totally create a chess set where pawns are all just tiny "troll faces". Or if they could have troll faces just for these moves, on those animated diagrams. "Problem, queen and rook?"

That piece of advice may be a little more specific to me. When I started out playing I was a fan of Paul Morphy. So I played a whole bunch of gambits, tried some risky sacs, and so forth. 

I would have a lot less loses on my record if I would've just started out playing fundamental chess first.