How to get to a 1500 rating in rapid?

Hello everyone!
I know this has been asked before but how do I get to 1500 rating in rapid?
I'm sort of stuck in low 1400's at this point and not improving much.
I play London system as white and don't really have an opening for black.
Thank you for reading <3

first of all do a lot of puzzles, and don't play tricky openings. Start to play 1e4 and learn some basics openings. London system on low rating is good because people dont know how to play against it. But with bigger rating its harder to get adventage against people in this opening. And regular training is best way to improve.

Hi, I just looked at two of your games, a loss and a win, and they were honestly very messy. First of all, you just need to keep practicing so you hang pieces less and get better at tactics. Continue to play rapid and do puzzles. Second, you have to look at the point of your opponents move before you go. Third of all, your positional play needs to be better, so try to focus on

Piece activity: Put your pieces on strong squares(which are weak for your opponent), strong diagonals, and strong files.
Pawn play: Look for pawn breaks, pawn storm when opposite side castling to open up their king, and try to avoid backward pawns or isolated pawns or doubled pawns because they are weaker. Note that sometimes, doing something like this for other compensation like an open file might be worth it, so you just have to weigh your options
Controlling the center: Don't play the london, it's important to learn how to more actively fight for the center, and also the london games are boring so you will learn less and get bored faster. You can just play natural developing moves, you don't need opening prep.
Also always make sure you understand your mistakes after the game.

In general, chess is really hard, and you need to play more to be better. Hope you have fun games and big rating gain ahead!

@street-magic Oh boy I was worried because it must of been minutes since a question like this was asked.

To get a 1500 rating on Lichess is different than other sites. You just have to start a new account and viola, you start at 1500.

But seriously...you just need to put in the reps and drill the basics. Do 1500 puzzles on Puzzle Streak. It will take you hours or maybe days.

Then until August, do 500 puzzles a day on either Puzzle Storm or Puzzle Streak. Variety is the spice of life.

In August go to a picnic or three. After the picnics rush home and play Chess 960 with 15 minute time controls and analyze the results with the computer and learn from your mistakes.

If you lost the game, then do 20 pushups, If you won it, do 10.

If you don't like Chess 960 then embrace the suck and learn it because you will enjoy finding all the tactics and not having to worry about any opening theory.

A 1400-1599 should know The Lucena Position and The Philidor Position. And at the very least, who is Jeremy Silman?

After you memorize these positions, make your way to YouTube and watch Jerry from Chess-Network because he is the best teacher on the platform by far, imo. After watching his series, Beginner To Chess Master, many times, and you know what holes are, what good and bad bishops look like, how to identify targets, how to maintain tension and the rest of the lessons, you will be crushing 1500's at rapid with the London System.

The previous poster made it sound like becoming 1500 is akin to running through hell fire but in all honesty you do not need anything crazy. While I would recommend doing as many puzzles as you can stand as that seems to be the weak point in your games. Do about 50 or so puzzles a day making sure you go back through and look at why, if you got it wrong, your move loses and then look at why the solution wins. This is key, if you don't do this puzzles become fairly worthless. Guessing does not help your chess, understanding the moves does.

In terms of openings for black I would recommend learning maybe 4 moves of the sicillian and the general ideas and rolling with it. I really wouldn't spend much time worrying about it.

I also disagree with (@)Sacmaniac in the fact that a 1500 does not need to know complicated endgames nor rook vs rook positions as, in my personal experience, it is not essential that I myself know them as a 1950ish player. Your time is better spent doing puzzles as they will help your calculation skills which will carry to the endgame. That said, you should know all the basic mates (excluding knight and bishop) including rook, queen, and 2 bishops mates.

Chess 960 is just a waste of time as it relies on a strong understanding of where pieces should go which you seem to not yet understand fully and learning a few moves of theory is not the end of the world.

Finally make sure you look at your games and use the learn from your mistakes button as it forces you to try the move again and lets you see if you lack an understanding of the plans in the position which can be improved by looking at the engine lines.

When doing puzzles or when trying to learn from mistakes, take your time. Go through the full line before making a move. Don’t be like me or you’ll be 1400 forever 😂

Forget London blah blah blah, stop dropping pieces. You're welcome.

I'd recommend analyzing games or watching others analyze games, and using the tactics in your own play.

@street-magic
Do puzzles, anylise games, and think about your moves.
If you are looking for an opening for black, I suggest playing e5 against e4, d5 and d4, and learn some theory (using opening explorer/find some studies).

If you do this you will get 1500+ in no time :)

Hope this helps!

Hey @street-magic while some of what I said was meant to be humorous tongue-in-cheek, most was quite serious and should of been explained better. So here goes....the pushup part was very serious if you want to get stronger generally at chess too. There is nothing like some discomfort to compel your mind to find shortcuts to eliminate pain.

Doing 500 puzzles a day will help you better than anything you can possibly do, in my experience of studying chess for 50 years. It's certainly not my idea, but I watched a YouTube video about the secrets of strong players and the GM suggested to become obsessed with doing tactics and it was best to do as much as possible, 500-1000 a day. He just kept saying that over and over. It still didn't sink in because....

When I heard him say this I didn't understand how that was possible because there wasn't something like Puzzle Storm or Puzzle Streak that came much later, so doing this many puzzles seemed impossible because many puzzles from books take quite a bit of time to solve.

However, he was talking about very simple puzzles and doing a ton of them because it is about pattern recognition and not the complexity of the puzzle. Times and methods have changed in the last 50 years, and I don't use books much any more, because there are apps and new technology to learn. Instead of doing 2 very difficult mate in two puzzles, it is much better to spend that time doing 100 simple puzzles because all tactics stem from skeletal ideas and there are only 5 families of tactics. Since January I solved over 40000 puzzles and noticed my biggest rating jump in my life.

The reason why Chess 960 is so good is because there was this famous GM called Bobby Fischer that invented it and called it New Chess and said it was the purest form of chess. I didn't believe him for the first 25 years or so because I didn't know anyone that played it or that it took about a minute to learn the rules.

I've beaten several strong masters in Chess 960.

Now, they didn't have a rating of 2200 plus at Chess 960 but they did at standard chess at either bullet, blitz, rapid or classic time controls. In fact I beat a friend of mine that is a NM for the first time in over 25 years because I didn't have to worry about his opening knowledge and instead I was superior tactically to him because of my muscle memory of doing about 300 tactics a day for months. It was an awesome boost of confidence that I will never get from playing him standard chess because of his vast opening knowledge from decades of practice.

So if you could do 500 a day you would have even better results than me perhaps. Again, it's not for everyone, unless you are serious about your time and want the biggest bang for your bucks.

For best results I would say only play players rated higher than you and don't worry about your rating. When you go back to standard chess like rapid time controls, you might actually be bored by it and stop playing it.

I mated one master rated almost 2500 in standard chess, and rarely play rapid or blitz and mostly focus on Chess 960 or doing puzzles now. Doing tactics, is actually the best part of chess for me, so why not do tactics the most?

Now, @Username_taken12 disagreed with Bobby Fischer and this other GM about Chess 960 and the amount of puzzles you should do daily but that is fine, you can get results as fast or as slow as you want in chess. If you want to do 20 puzzles a day and pour over them, that works too, just remember, time is the most valuable thing you have, especially at my age, hahaha.

Also, the basic endgame positions like Lucena and Philidor will win you so many games, it's hard to believe. Because rook and pawn endgames happen so often. This is the advice of Jeremy Silman and not my idea. You don't need to know a lot of endgame theory or buy a ton of books, but I would suggest you find a copy of his Complete Endgame Course and read up on what you should expect from a 1400-1600 player in regards to endgame knowledge. Hope that clears things up. Cheers.