A year to go from 1600 to 2000?

Organized 5 - 6 hours each day for a year to 400 point improvement?

No way, but if you're talented with the right study approach and willing to put in hard work then I would say it is possible to go 1600-1800+ in 1 year, and 1800-2000 the year after that. It would be a great achievement imo.

I think you can make it in less than a year. I myself improved by joining this site and playing games (and posting) at the same time studying Capas books and that of Spasskys. Had a sparring partner who played against my fav opening although i lost all of it, it greatly improved my play by learning from the games. You would see from my game archives that i can beat 1700 players here. I think chess study, play and friendly advices you get from  friends here at chess.com will help. Yesterday i earned third place finish in a tourney rated 1900 and below. "Everything is possible" Kevin Garnet (after the celtics won the nba finals way back when).

Who knows man lol.  I started this site in January at 1200, hovered around 1150 for a bit and now I am at 1250-1300.  I think it's possible but unlikely as competition grows exponentially harder at the 2000 range.

Nearly impossible.  Some of the fastest improving and best players in the world didn't go from 1600 to 2000 in a year (although someone may find 1 or 2).

With 5 to 6 hours a day of good study (and playing long games) you would probably go from 1600 to between 1700 and 1800.

What are you talking about an improvement in? Blitz? Bullet? Live? TT? Chess Mentor? Online games? Standard Live Games?

And what rating system are you talking about? Elo? FIDE? Glicko? USCF?

And what does "organized" mean? 100% study time? 100% playing time? Or some undefined combination of the two?

Really?  I'd be interesting in your rating graph.  Of course people can gain even 1000 points in a year, but to go from 1600-2000 strength (vs 1600-2000 rating) is much harder.  If that's what you did it's very impressive! :)

If you never seriously studied chess before, I think it is possible, if you put enough time into it. And 5-6 hours a day is a lot.

I went from 1628 to 1965 in 2 years (national rating), simply because I started playing a lot more tournaments (OTB, 2h/40moves).

The rating system is a bit confusing because it's exponential.  400 points is a huge gap.  Going from 1600 to 2000 is not a 25% improvement in skill, a 2000 player beats a 1600 player 95%+ of the time.  So next year you would have to improve so much that you would almost never lose to yourself today.

As a basketball analogy, 2600 is like NBA, 2200 is like Division I college, 1800 is like high school team, 1400 is like your average decent pickup game player, 1000 is a guy who plays with friends every now and then.  Going from 1600 to 2000 in one year would be like going from a guy who couldn't make the high school varsity to having college teams looking at you in one season, possible but unlikely.

@Shadowknight911: oh! I can't believe it !!!

YOU are probably a nice player :)

I went from zero to 1400 in my first tournament.

I can top that. When I came back to competitive chess after an eighteen year lay off, the grader installed me at ECF 160 (1930), without playing a single game.

Sure it's possible. It all depends on how you're studying and practicing.

If you really want to ensure fast progress, hire a master-level coach.

and how does it work anyway? just to be curious, not that im in the right state of mind for that, but i played with that idea for long?? do you have him work with you several hours a day, or does he give you training stuff that you do, or how does it look like???

There are many options, but you always need to work on your own to leverage the coaching.

It depends on the coach.

But for me, I had lessons with a National Master. I went to his house once a week and had a two-hour session. He made a binder for me, to keep all the games I played, and he reviewed each one with me to discuss strategies and reasons for each move.

We agreed on an opening repertoire and all my games were to be played in those openings. We went over strategies specific to that opening and discussed pawn structure themes.

I didn't keep with it (it got expensive after a while) but it was very helpful. I shot up a few hundred points in a few months.

Hmm, looks more like 18 months to me.

I guess I'm assuming the OP is a beginner and is wonder how long it will take.

If you've been playing and doing some minor studying and not making much progress you're still learning and practicing, it's just not helping your results much.  At that point if you get a coach and work your butt off, sure, you can gain many hundreds of points in a year... but you can't ignore the experience and learning you did before that. 

Michael de la Mesa is a well known example of 400 points in about 1 year.  He's also a good example IMO of someone who did a lot of learning before that rating jump, but it didn't improve his results due to poor tactics.  Maybe his rating graph advertises 400 points in 400 days, but his studying does not support this.

Otherwise we can enthrall the OP with stories like mine... I went from 0 to 1500 in my first tournament.  Isn't that impressive?  (Yeah, but how long had I been paying before that...)