I am finding chess extremely depressing.

#1 @myocarditis
So you want your chess performance to chime in with your school results and with your career as a writer of several books etc.
7 or 8 accounts, if you put in at least as much time and effort into each one of them as into this one (1day, 2 hours and 3 minutes) that would be 8 days, 16 hours and 24 minutes of time played. Okay.
Now you say you would like to be around 1800, but you argue against the impossibilty of the task to become a master or expert, which would be about 2400/2200 lichess for a fide 2200/2000, (very roughly).
Youtube and tubers are great resources, but Eric Rosen, I do not know his channel, seems too advanced for you. Okay.
I do not see where chess needs us to be good at numbers, except for the numbers 1-8, maybe.
Pattern recognition is important most everywhere, no chess specialty. Serious memorising of lines comes into play at higher levels than lichess 1800, I believe.
If you don't apply memorized lines, your opponents are out of book at once, and tactics are not a waste of time as they will arise on both sides.
Puzzles should make you stare, and reward you with a solution, self-found or disclosed. What else do you expect happening?
Endgames comes down to number crunching? For engines, everything does, for humans, nothing. Endgames are just awesome. Go get a book!
Do 1200ers have openings memorized here? No. Do they play crazy counters? Yes, indeed. Be glad you found them. Do 1200ers use engine support? No. Coaches are either good or not so good.
Your evaluation of your situation is not right. You are playing chess, you will get what you deserve, as it is per se the fair game. If you want to have the same success as in school or profession, you will have to earn it, it does not translate. You feel it ought to just happen, “this abnormality” as you feel you must call it, ought to go.
Use your senses to tell yourself you are part of the chess world, with its own things to discover, learn and excel in. On every level you can have the joy of improvement. Don't look at were you think you ought to be. It is not about that. Love chess, so to feel fine wherever you are on a rating list.

Unless the OP's a troll I'll say only two things: fix your attitude or the game's not for you.

Guys, try to be a bit more supportive please. Sure OP might sound like chess was about free handouts when it’s really a constant struggle. Yes, his mind set is definitively off as you can’t expect to be good at everything just because you decided your intelligence is above average as you have to weigh in the work and the hours everybody else put into the matter at hand.

Chess is clinical, humbling, overwhelming. Change your POV and you have limitless potential in a beautiful competitive sport with a high ceiling that allows for a lifetime of learning and improvement. Moreover you can just enjoy it at any level if your able to get rid off unrealistic expectations. Ima sound like a broken record, but one step at a time.

@pointlesswindows said in #29:
> It is a big lie that everybody can be a master at anything. The propaganda of success is like a disease these days. Then the disillusion comes, which ca be painful. You realise that you will never be a concert pianist, famous singer, boxing champion, olympic medalist, noble prize winner or... a chess master. Stop and think. Don't believe youtubers. People are different.
>
> In chess you need to find your place. Just like in life. You don't have to be successful to be alive. It is all bs propaganda of the mass media.
@pointlesswindows said in #29:

Well said.

@myocarditis said in #1:
> Okay, posting here because my failure to improve at chess is starting to impact on my mental health.

If you are not improving, you are using a wrong method of training. Get a better one. A modular one. Train just 1 thing until you get decent at it, then switch to another one.

>I consider myself a pretty intelligent person

Intelligence does not necessarily correlate with a good chess level. There is a lot of skill involved, which has to be developed. Having more cognitive level is desired obviously, but it doesnt take much to get decent.

> I feel like we've been sold a lie by Youtubers, e.g. take Eric Rosen playing the Stafford Gambit and winning game after game, I watch the video, try it, and literally no player falls into any of the traps which happen on Youtube,

I suppose many people see Eric Rosen and know how to not fall. Maybe you should look something less mainstream. But you shouldnt play for traps, you should play solid games.

> Example - how many openings are there and gambits to learn and memorise?

I cant tell you the amount of openings and/or gambits, since i dont know the number, i cant possibly even memorize them, however, you as a player, just need to know Just a couple openings per color, though the emphasis its actually to understand the ideas behind them, they are just a decent set up to get to mid game, maybe 7-10 moves at most, 2-3 variations, the less options possible the better to avoid deviation. Actually knowing the chess principles will explain why the opening makes sense, and if you have good principles you dont actually need to know opening theory. The basic principles also guide you when you enter unknown territory and see the opponent trying to set up a trap or gambit. Dont memorize stuff. Understand the idea behind.

> Tactics - yes okay but if you try to use tactics against somebody who has memorised all of the movesets you are just wasting your time. Endgames - comes down to pure number crunching and as per the above, you will get smashed on openings anyway.

1st. You CANT memorize all the move sets. Memorization of fixed positions is not encouraged. Knowledge about patterns is.
2.- If you are losing a lot, ill make a wild guess and ill say that plenty of those were due to tactics you fell for. So you have a very low level regarding tactics, and when you try to apply a low level tactic to some one who has a higher level than you, he can see it crystal clear and can parry it with ease. The solution is just to get better than the opponent in that particular field so you can see yours and his, but he wont be able to see yours, as your tactics are more sophisticated.

Endgames are not pure number crunching, its actually way more complex than that. But thats the Dunning-Kruger talking. same about openings.

> In terms of puzzles yes I do them, half are really easy, half I just stare at for hours then get wrong because there is no obvious way to proceed within them.

You dont know how to use them to train if you cant see the "obvious" way to proceed. If you cant see something "obvious", then its not obvious for you. 15+5 might be obvious for you, but not for a first grader. Things get obvious when you actually know them. So you dont know how to solve those puzzles because your skill at the theme used to solve it is very low nor non existent. Thats where your "focus" should go, to learn the stuff you dont understand, in order to understand it and make it obvious, not to memorize variations of a video you saw on youtube because the host got many wins with it.

>Games, I have tried to focus on E4/D4 openings but even 1200 players seem to have learned all the openings and play some crazy counter, I am also convinced half the players on here are cheating with other chess engines open and stuff.

Nah, im convinced you have no real foundation of the principles of the game if even 1200 players can see your obvious mistakes.

> I guess I am just feeling so disillusioned right now,

I think that your ego got hurt because you equate intelligence to being good at chess, and you are not good at chess.

>the other thing is half of the coaching resources out there etc are just money-grabbing schemes aimed at selling you this idea that you'll get good,

Maybe, but you also need to understand that piling stuff requires good foundations, else the whole thing can only reach so high. So bad chess foundations maybe dont let you grow regardless of how good your coach is? Its not always the coaches fault.

>but I guess there is a part of me now wondering if it is just futile and I should just stop playing chess so that I feel better about myself? Another part of me wants so badly to keep trying, but I find chess so ultimately depressing now, the anger I feel every time I lose, the amount of focus I put on my rating all the time and the fact that it isn't good enough,, that maybe someone like me should just quit for my own health?

That doesnt talk very good about your character. Part of growing is getting up from the falls even stronger than before.
The anger issue is other thing. If losing gets the best of you, its not the chess, is competing and losing. You cant win all games, if you cant handle losing, you are gonna fail miserably in life, because we take a lot of l's in life. You do have to fix that.

The amount of focus, hmmm. more is not merrier always. Your problem is not the amount, its how you are focusing. Its like a bodybuilder doing right bicep one day, left leg the other day, then shoulder the other, skipping back all together and eating churros everyday. yep, it doesnt work. You have to be systematic, specifically on the skills you have at very low level or dont know at all, until you get good at them.
Also, the results are not immediate. They take a bit of time to show, even when you are training correctly, but you can definitely tell when they are starting to kick in when you start to see things on the board that were invisible before.

Yeah, i just saw your last game. I was correct, you have 0 foundations of the game.



Im going to give you a couple tips. If you implement them in your game, you will improve. Seriously, just by implementing them.
1.- Dont play gambits. You need certain level of skill to play them if you cant recover the pawn right away.
2.- Develop your minor pieces to active squares that have some impact on the center of the board.
3.- If you can avoid moving twice a piece before everything is developed, by all means, move something else.
4.- Dont move the queen too early unless you actually gain something from it. A check doesnt give you points, unless he loses castling rights. If you have to protect a piece, a square or you capture something sure, else dont.
5.- Try to castle as soon as possible.
6.- If you are making a move, it has to have a purpose. Denying a square, giving problems to the enemy development, an actual treat. getting out of danger, opening lines/squares for another of your pieces. If none of the above is true, is a useless move, find something else.
7.- use your bishops to make pins, but you dont have to actually take the piece, let him solve the problem to unpin first, then you might actually just reroute the bishop to do another one.
8.- Before making a move, check if any piece is hanging.
9.- Dont move on impulse, take your time to verify all the steps on this list.
10.- Actually write it down, play a 15 min game or longer and follow it.

Once you more or less get better results, you have to learn some other stuff, but try this and you will see you will play better.
Give it a go some 10 games, you should see a difference.

My experience is the other way around. Chess is such a wonderful and therapeutic game. Regarding improving it takes time. Just relax. Take a coffee. Take a chess book or two; or even three. And enjoy the game each and every day.

@pointlesswindows said in #31:
> But then, if somehow I play sombody like that, and get a 2000 performance from a 1500 player, I immediatelly, I mean immediatelly send a report for sandbagging.
>
> just go for the free site Mangus Carslen created .
> What site?

First of all it's not called sandbagging and i don't know the sites name and i just heard about it somewhere

@AnanyaMorzaria said in #48:
> First of all it's not called sandbagging and i don't know the sites name and i just heard about it somewhere
The site is called chess24 but even Magnus plays on lichess. Chess.com depressed me its so toxic full of sandbagging alts and rude fakes. If it wasn't for lichess I would have stopped playing chess. Like I said rating means nothing as long as u get close to a 50/50 w/l. Just have fun.

@myocarditis said in #1:

> I feel like we've been sold a lie by Youtubers, e.g. take Eric Rosen playing the Stafford Gambit and winning game after game, I watch the video, try it, and literally no player falls into any of the traps which happen on Youtube, I feel like we are being sold this myth that we will get the glory and fame of getting good at chess when 99% of us it will NEVER happen, we simply do not have the mental ability to do what professional players do.
>

Playing for traps is not an effective way to improve. I have a friend I've known since we first played each other in 1977 who plays for traps. Forty years ago, we were the same level. He's still at that level (~1300 USCF). He's really happy when someone walks into one of his traps, and he's beat players much stronger than himself when they do. But his overall win rate is very low and he has no chance against the young kids coming up who are always strong tactically.