My advice (as a chess coach and 2100+ player):
Learn and apply the most important principles of chess.
Always blunder-check your moves.
Solve tactics in the right way.
Analyze your games.
Study games of strong players.
Learn how to be more psychologically resilient.
Work on your time management skills.
Get a coach if you can.
I’m currently around 1200 elo. So far, what I’ve been thinking is, I learn one white opening, and two black opening.
As white I’ve been slowly building my strategy around the English opening, as it’s not a very common opening and is quite good at throwing off players of this level who are not very experienced in its theory. As I get to start, I don’t think I need to know play other white openings at the moment.
For black, I play the accelerated Dragon Sicilian, or the regular Dragon Sicilian depending on how white respond against e4.
And the other is the Dutch opening against d4, which is also not a common opening at this level although it’s not great at higher elo. For the moment it’s fine though, and I’m planing to learn to play the Nimzo Indian at some point when I get to 1400-1500 elo.
But on good days, I regularly play 1500-1800 elo games according to review so my plan in the near future is to get to know my openings even better to make less bad games and be more consistent till I reach 1400-1500.
Do you have any thoughts, comments or advice ?