Overcoming a Rating Plateau

I have been stuck around 1900 Elo for roughly six months. What is your experience with rating plateaus and how do you overcome them?

Generally I'd say you need to change your methods of training. I managed to get up to around 2000~ elo spending most of my time doing tactics puzzles and obviously having some basic overall understanding but couldn't push through until I changed to working on openings and the middlegame plans which arose from them.

This might not apply to you as you'll have different problems to me but concentrating on a new area will no doubt help.

Squidgy is correct. There are many paths to 2000. Between tactical genius, fundamental understanding/application, opening study, studying your own games, studying your most common opponents, and endgame study, in no particular order, any of which could boost your score 100 points, there is much to this game.

One of the most overlooked aspects is the various psychological themes that impede lower-rated players.

When it comes to Grandmasters, we can be sure of two things:

1. They are completely free to create the best moves in any given position.

2. When they sit there and think for 14 minutes straight, in positions where we can't make use of more than 2 minutes of analysis, they are exercising a brain-process that lower-rated players have no idea exists. It's got to do with "creative-evaluation" and carefully weighing the pros-cons regarding what each piece is doing and what kinds of opportunities a move would provide/mitigate.

Your flaw could be in any number of areas, it's even possible that you don't have a flaw and your thought process needs time to evolve and digest what you've learned, but without reviewing your games, it won't hurt to reiterate what we're doing at the chess board and why we're here.

The fact that you're concerned with a plateau tells us that your mind is not focused on the most appropriate ideas.

Stop worrying about your score.
Resume worrying about making the best moves.

Take a step back and remember what it is about chess that you love, then, play with the expressed purpose of experiencing THAT.
Make experiencing THAT, your only concern. There shouldn't be room for worry about scores.

We're here to prove brilliant ideas and ingenious arguments.
We're not here to worry about points.

In fact...

...those two are enemies and can't possibly share space:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUMgonREEJo

On a first glance you seem serious about improving, so I'll try to help you as well (kind of short of time though).

There is a very common thing 90%+ of the people here (tbh. not only here) tend to do.

something along the lines of "Help, I'm stuck, period."

To draw a simplistic analogy, this is similar to me going to a doctor telling him "Help, I'm sick", maybe adding something along the lines ("since last friday")

or "I'm unhappy with my job" "some sort of an office job"

There is hardly a way to get useful advice in both of these OFFLINE cases handled by EXPERTS prior to adding more info.

In an online chess forum...I think you got my point by now ;)

Anyway, out of the few infos you posted here and w/o examining your online games I can tell you:

1. it is VERY normal for people to stagnate once/twice for 6 month at a level somewhere between 1800-2000. Almost all of my friends who eventually became good experts/masters/IMs had a similar streak.

2. There are plenty of reasons for this. Maybe everything is fine and you are progressing but experiencing a delay. There is a good chance that you have some flaws hindering your progress. People tend to struggle with all kind of different things, there is hardly a way to generalize things.

3. you better provide more infos (age/results/training routine/games played/progress/ ... ..... .... ) to get better advice - maybe you'll develop some ideas by yourself in the process.

EDIT: to answer your very specific question:: I can recall two times where I overcame (somewhat longer) stagnation streaks by 1) doing nothing and just playing more 2) finally going through some opening theory which i refused to previously . However it's only a thing about my individual "story"

How long have you been playing for?
How old are you?
What aspects of chess do you like?
What aspects don't you like?
Why do you play?
What do you think a 'chess move' is about?
Where do you think you could improve? Why?

Annotate your top 3 games, your reasons that you picked them, and all of your thoughts behind each and every move.

I don't need to know about how a piece is pinned, I couldn't care less about any tactics at all. Omit those.

What I want to know is what you think, how you think, and why you think what you think.

This will be the insight that's needed to help you.

Chances are if you're asking for a generic fix to a very vague problem, the issue is going to be a complete lack of fundamentals.

Typically, people at your rating are tactically proficient (far moreso than me), but you have almost no fundamental basis for your moves.

This is a guess, but it's typcially accurate, because I don't see how someone could observe and employ fundamentals, and think that asking for a "1 size fits all fix" doesn't have a very simple misunderstanding regarding what chess is...hence the list of questions.