Why am I always so bad at chess?

I have been playing chess since I was 6 and have been playing on this site for nearly 3 years, but I still am stuck in 400 rating, I was that rating 2 years ago, the highest rating I ever got on this website was 800, then I dropped down to 400, I have a true passion for chess, I keep playing and learning with motivation but I still don’t improve, and I don’t make any progress. I feel bad that I can’t develop this talent. I have tried everything to try to get better and stronger at chess, but nothing works, what should I do now?

Quit playing speed chess.  There is your free lesson.

I don’t, I only ply 30 min games

You played this game:

https://www.chess.com/game/live/18129652435?username=flamingchessbishop

You lost in 16 moves and still had 27:48 on the clock.  So yes you play speed chess.

you are a wait i forgot

 

ate a toilet of poo

Or here, you though you played the Sicilian but did nothing but play moves you memorized, and hung a pawn move 3 and resigned.

https://www.chess.com/game/live/18127396267?username=flamingchessbishop

 

Here you lost in 12 moves and had 24:59 left on the clock.

https://www.chess.com/game/live/17977256563?username=flamingchessbishop

Yes..you are playing speed chess.

You are under the impression that 30 minutes on the clock is any different than 10 minutes or less on the clock, when you only end up using 10 minutes or less in a large number of your games.

A larger amount of time to start with will do nothing for you when you play at the rate most people would in blitz chess.

Also, actually look to see if any of your pieces are hanging, instead of mindlessly playing moves without regards for the fact that there exists a human on the other side, who wants terrible things for you in the context of the game, and will try their hardest to inflict such atrocities upon you via their pieces.

Hey mate!

When you’re playing that long and not seeing improvement you got to stop and think ok, I’m doing this wrong so how do I correct this?

Playing and learning are often two different things. You can learn by playing but you have to be diligent about 1) playing with purpose and not moving to move and 2) reviewing all your games to uncover your mistakes and figure out how to correct them.

But generally you learn outside of playing by 1) learning tactical motifs and then practicing them by solving puzzles 2) learning general or specific opening ideas 3) learning typical endgame techniques and ideas 4) review games by masters, seeing how they develop their pieces and their ideas during the game.

Are you doing any of that? My guess is no or not with any significant consistency.

Try this for 3 weeks minimum and after a month see if you’ve improved.

1) play one 15 minute or longer time control game with an increment of at least 10 seconds a day and NO MORE. At the end of the game if you’ve lost you should have NO MORE than 5 minutes left on your clock. And you should NEVER move faster than 10 seconds on any given move during the game- EVEN obvious moves. After the game you must review the game and write 1 paragraph on what happened, why you think you won or lost, and what was the biggest mistake you made (no matter the result I assure you, you’ll have made at least one mistake!).

2) solve 20 puzzles a day before you play your daily game. If you get less than 50% correct- 1) slow down 2) stop guessing. Regardless, any missed puzzles review/replay 3 times. You can use any website for this, doesn’t have to be chess.com puzzles.

3) learn the opening principles and do them in your games. If you’re white you should always be at least equal or greater in development against your opponent after each turn before move 10. If you’re not, you aren’t following opening principles more than likely. With black try to be equal or minimum 1 piece slower after your move. Doesn’t matter the openings you play, waste your time learning an opening instead of opening principles and 9/10 games you’ll never play those openings you learned or squander away your advantage as soon as your opponent deviates from your known theory. Learn to THINK not MEMORIZE.

4) every turn look at the position and identify any checks, any captures, and any moves that threaten an underdefended piece or more valuable pieces. Before you complete a move ask yourself- are all my pieces safe?

I bet if you do the above you’ll begin to notice marked improvement in your play. Cheers to chess improvement!

Wow! 

I gotta ask...

How does it taste?

When you get stuck at that level, it's about greed.

You have to do your best to not lose anything for free... not even a single pawn.

Since you haven't been doing this for years it will be difficult to break old habits and make new habits... but this is the first step: greed.

So for example play a 30 minute game, and every time after your opponent moves, look at every single square that is attacked by the piece that moved. If it's attacking any squares with one of your pieces on it, and if your piece is not defended, then you only have 2 options:

1) Defend the piece
2) Move the piece to safety.

When you get better there's a 3rd option which is counter attack, but those usually fail, so ignore that for now. Just defend or retreat.

Go through this process for a few dozen games or until you start getting comfortable with it.

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Once you master that then we're going to add a step. Before you move, imagine your candidate move as if it's been made, and check to see if your opponent can capture it for free. If your opponent can't do that, then look for all your undefended pieces and all the captures your opponent can play. If your opponent can capture something for free then choose a different move that keeps everything safe.

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If you master those two steps you'll gain a few 100 points worth of rating. Then you can move on to basic tactics like forks, pins, removing the defender, and discovered attack.

 

Or to say it more simply... the main goal for most players and in most positions should NOT be to find a good move

The goal is to find a move that isn't bad. So the process is selecting a candidate, and then looking for the WORST aspects of that move. After looking at its worst aspects, if you still like it, then you can play it.

That's the basic idea. Try to find out why a move is bad.

I'll challenge you to a daily, and we will see if there are any problems.

 

So far most of the advices I have seen here is good, you should consider them and I haven't checked out any of your matches yet so I'm going to make a few educated guesses here. Let's start off with chess "theory".

1) Assuming that you are studying openings and such, are you trying to improvise? not trying to improvise will lead to failures. A lot of people assume that simply reading about an opening will make them better - there's a difference between copying an opening and understanding an opening, same applies for endgames, etc and many people read some book about opening theories without exactly understanding the cause of the disadvantages or advantages,  they won't try to improvise and apply an if statement in case something goes wrong.

 

2) Time control; understand your brain. not everyone has a brain capable of adapting to bullet or blitz speed regardless of the patterns they try to study. Chess is indeed highly based on game theory and patterns and many people usually assume "study, get used to the patterns and then you can become quicker" this logic right here doesn't apply to everyone, anyone with any type of common sense regarding neuroscience would know that. Understand your brain, understand what it can handle.

3) Training; How are you exactly studying chess? Do you go against engines? Look through chess databases? Play other humans and have them correct your mistakes? I'll explain the pros and cons of each. The cons of relying on an engine(depending on the engine) would normally be just that it's not human-like, you won't learn how to fight a human by fighting a tiger, you won't learn how to swing on trees like monkeys by swimming with fish, even if you tried to take notes of engine patterns, it would be difficult for you to exactly get better(yes you could find out that certain move is better than another but you will have to do a lot more than that to truly learn from an engine). The cons with chess databases is well.. it stores a lot of flaws; relying too much on a chess database will help you improve while secretly making you horrible and I'm sure that you know the cons of the other training method. what you want to do here is not rely too much on either methods if you want to improve without secretly getting worse, learn how to utilize the tools.

 

finish lessons, take your time to think of every move when playing, analyze your game

I taught chess to my nephew two months ago, he is 5 and half years old. He first was just pushing pieces now he can see traps.. My guess is; his strength is around 700~. I don't want to be mean but chess might not be the best game for you. Talking based on your given informations.

@zes0460 has a point. 
In so many years most people would have made some progress. 

But maybe you just have to take a different approach. 
In hockey, before you can play hockey, you must learn how to skate on ice.

 

First learn how to play chess before you play speed chess.

 

I don’t really believe in puzzles, because when I do them I already know what I am looking for.

In real live OTB games, my opponent is not going to say:” you can look for a fork now, or a skewer situation.” You have to figure it out for yourself what the possibilities are.

 

Keep playing games, a couple of games a day and try to learn as many as possible from mistakes. I really recommend chess.com lessons. In my opinion, the lessons are well instructed, even for a guy like me who doesn’t speak English. Watch the vids and then do the exercises.

Don’t just move pieces because you have some kind of plan. Also try to figure out what your opponent is trying to do or what he/she can do if you make a certain move. 

Follow the basics, like controle the centre and develop your pieces. 

Speed chess has never appealed to me.  It instills bad habits.