How long does it take to "get good"?

Interesting project! Just as an anecdote, I was a pretty stable player around 1950 and hadn't really improved in years. A couple of months ago I started doing puzzle storms and my rating jumped to around 2050 within a month and has gravitated there ever since. I thought that was really interesting. I mostly play bullet, so it makes sense that training at seeing typical patterns very quickly would be useful, but I never thought it could make such a difference, especially at 45.

Wery wery cool!!! I love it.

I have played for about two and a half years now, of which the first half year was erratic and consisted mostly of just blitz and opening trap videos. Needless to say I didn't improve much. But after a while I started playing longer games, doing puzzles, analyzing my games, and watching games explained by Chessnetwork, Agadmator and so on. Hanging Pawns, John Bartholomew and the STL videos by Caleb Denby also helped a lot. Over the past two years my studying has gradually transitioned in to somewhat serious studiyng. But I have done this whilst going to school and working part-time so on average less then an hour per day. I now have a Lichess rapid rating of 2134 which places me in the 95th percentile. Sure, some talent might be part of the equation. I will not disclose my IQ publicly but it is nothing too extreme. I have also never had a coach and have payed less than 50 USD in Books and courses. This goes to show that chess improvement is attainable for everyone. We all hit some kind of plateau sooner or later, but with time, dedication and discipline you will be able to go further. My biggest mistake in the beginning was playing to quickly and not analyzing properly. When most players analyse they basically ask the engine for all the answers, only half of which they understand. What I have been doing these past months is analyze without the engine first. Then you should write down your analysis in detail, then and only then are you allowed to see what the computer thinks. This way you are not just checking the moves you played but also your reason for playing them.

Hope this helps someone! Good luck

As people here are sharing personal anecdotes, many of which are surprisingly similar to mine, I'll share one myself. So I started playing at the start of last year, but unlike some people here, I really did start from scratch - I knew how the pieces moved, but I didn't even know some of the basic rules like castling and promotion. In the beginning, I progressed really fast - it only took me a month to reach 1200 on chess.com (1600 on Lichess Blitz), for example. But then, from 1500 (1800 on Lichess Blitz) to 1850 (2000 Lichess Blitz), my progress slowed down by a noticeable amount. So, while I was rated 1400 (1750 LB) 3 months in, I was only rated 1850 (2000 LB) by the time a full year has passed. Luckily, my improvement has sped up once again since then, and I was able to improve from 1850 (2000 LB) to 2200 (2300 LB) in just 6 months.

So, 1 year and 10 months after I played my first ever chess game, I'm rated 2200+ on chess.com in both Rapid and Blitz - the rough equivalent of 2400 and 2300 on here, respectively (my rating here is lower than it's supposed to be because I don't take Lichess as seriously). I hope to be able to reach 2400 in Blitz (which is about the same on both websites) by the time I've played chess for 2 full years.

Like the others, I didn't do any formal studying - reading books, doing puzzles regularly, booking up on theory etc - I mostly just played and watched YouTube videos. I did recently get a coach, so we'll see how that affects my rate of improvement.

Maybe their is correlation between length of games played and improvement, people who play blitz and bullet would improve less compared to people who play rapid or classical. Can you share your dataset with us?

personally, I started playing back in july of 2020, though it was on chess.com (equivalent rating of 850 on here, 500 on cc)
I hit 1950 rapid rating in november of that year, plateaued and lost interest in serious chess for awhile, and then got back into it a month or so ago, and peaked at ~2150 since then. my progress is hella cursed though, and I need to take chess study a bit more seriously I think...

Statistically, it takes forever to get good: the average player never gets good:)

Deidara & Tobi? love