Not sure how to improve further from here.

I'm looking for a special tip/strategy that may help me advance further in my chess skill.

Beyond tactics, I've realised that every rise in my chess rating is because of a sudden realisation of moves/strategies. For example, for a long time I never played stuff like pawn to a3 or h3 (as white) because I thought they were reactive, not proactive moves. Then I realised you could play those moves to DETER opponents from even pinning your knight or attacking your king, and my rating increased.

Other examples would be how even if a move could be defended easily, it would force your opponent's move and possibly weaken his position slightly. Or how trading a bishop for the knight could double pawns. Or how I began to view pawns as important pieces that actually needed to be defended (I used to ignore threats on my pawns). Or how if Black castled kingside and advanced his g7 pawn, you could plant a super powerful bishop on h6.

Little things like that helped me reach where I am now, but now I've been stuck for awhile. I'm sure there are more stuff out there that would help my game, but I just don't know where to learn. There doesn't seem to be any websites or blogs that point out small stuff like this, they're all just general basic stuff like good/bad bishops and knight outposts.

Anyone have some helpful tips or maybe some website links? It seems crazy that the top players are a thousand points higher than me still, it's such a big difference in skill and I don't really know what makes that difference.

i have th esame problems

Identifying and Controlling Key Squares
www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVBxUIDoy5Q

At your rating, winning games isn't about making great moves, it's just about avoiding blunders. What I suggest is to do two tactics checks each turn. First, right after your opponent makes a move, immediately scan the board for tactics. Also, right after you decide what move you want to play, do another scan of the board to see if your opponent will have any tactics of his own after your move. This tip if done correctly should get any player to at least 1700-1800 lichess classical in my opinion, even with very little positional understanding or endgame skills.

Another tip is whenever you or your opponent makes a move, make a mental note of how the position changes. Lets say you move a knight, you then could think to yourself "The knight is no longer defending this piece or this pawn, but is now attacking this square". After making this mental note, you can follow up on it by determining how this affects the position. Maybe now that this knight is no longer defending a piece, you need to either move the piece or defend it with something else. And now that the knight is now attacking this new square, you're threatening X tactic. Calculation is much easier and faster if you just focus on how the position changes each turn, rather than calculating everything from scratch each time.

Last tip - run a computer analysis at the end of every game. See where you screwed up and look for patterns over time so you know how to improve.

Join a club, read some books, a trainer, tons of practice, re-evaluation of your games, offline competition. It turns out to be hard work for some years or decades, one year roaming in the internet is nothing.

There‘s rather no general advice except for exposing oneself to as much chess patterns as possible in a serious way.

"My System" by Nimzovich is still a great book, albeit somewhat outdated on some issues.

@DubiousChess Yeah I try to do that already and my blunder rate has been decreasing a lot recently. I think of the 7 games I played yesterday of which I won 6 and lost 1, I didn't blunder in 4 or 5 of them. But yes, I agree that I should aim for 0 blunders all the time. Still gotta work on that.

I regularly analyse games by myself for about 5 minutes, especially at critical sharp points where I get that "there must be a tactic here". That's not really long but I think it's enough. I computer analyse all my games as well and do the "learn from your mistakes" thing. Mistakes are something I haven't really grasped to be honest, often I make what I think are decent moves and the computer considers it a Mistake. Oh well.

@Sarg0n Thanks, yeah. Unfortunately I can't find any good chess clubs in my local area (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia). I wish there was the equivalent of St. Louis Chess Club here, haha. Too bad here in Malaysia chess isn't a very big thing, we don't even have a GM. I have bought a couple of books, namely My System and Logical Chess: Move by Move. Logical Chess is still in delivery so in the meantime I've just read a few chapters of My System (the first 3 chapters, the ones about IQPs and pawn chains).

I also hired a coach who is only about 1800 FIDE, but he has lots of good exercises to do and crushes me in chess anyway so I can learn plenty from him. He gave me Starting Out: The Slav and Semi-Slav which was a present he got from a friend. He has about 200 chess books in his computer, I just need to get a proper computer to download the chess GUI needed to use the format used by those chess books (they're not pdf).

I play a little against friends at school but they all suck. To put it bluntly, I destroy them. There is, however, a 16-year-old CM in my school, but he doesn't play chess at school. I suppose he's too good to waste his time with noobs! I also have a twin brother who plays nice tactical chess (he doesn't read much theory but hell he's a challenge, he plays so many weird moves that catch me off guard).

Hello, let's learn chess by Skype together. We can solve chess tactics and watch chess videos.

@IainLim
"I'm looking for a special tip/strategy that may help me advance further in my chess skill."
Objectivity.
Some moves are better than others. Many moves you think are good or ok are actually very bad and losing. Many moves you don't even think about are the ones you should play.

"I don't really know what makes that difference."
If you are about 1600 Lichess Classical, it usually means that your blunder rate is very high. You are doing too many tactical mistakes/errors/blunders.

"There‘s rather no general advice except for exposing oneself to as much chess patterns as possible in a serious way." - Sarg0n

@IainLim
"Mistakes are something I haven't really grasped to be honest, often I make what I think are decent moves and the computer considers it a Mistake. Oh well."
Yes.
That's it.
Are you able to analyze the position by yourself (you may use an engine) and figure out IF it is actually a mistake (hint: it usually is) and WHY (hint: the answer usually lies deep in the calculations and have something to do with candidate moves you had never considered)?