Any tips on getting better? I started playing in january and im kind of stuck in 1150 in lichess rapid 1100 blitz. I constantly fuck up, and most of the times feel like i dont even know wtf im doing.
If you are 1150 then do a lot of mating puzzles. Winning in a simulation will raise your confidence and help you formulate a plan. Intuitively you will want to bring these images to fruition in your own games. You will get an idea of what the game is about naturally and what you should be doing. Everything that follows is just a more sophisticated version of the same idea: Win the game! Studying tactics and strategy will help you arrive at a position where winning the game is more likely to occur, but if you can't actually win the game then none of that matters! It's all calculation, or more simply stated for our purposes here: clear visualization. I can't really remember what I was thinking back then but it was probably some fantasy land bullshit while I was getting checkmated in some utterly prosaic fashion real time. So concrete, down to earth, routine exercises like mates are the things most deserved of attention early on. Because your opponents aren't going to see shit, and you aren't going to see shit... and the pawn structure doesn't matter, and the material doesn't matter... Somebody is just going to win because they wanted to and got lucky. So I guess the big takeaway should be: at 1150 if you can see mate in 2 you can hang your queen all day and win 90% of the time. On the prophylactic side: chances are a lot of the things you think are scary are actually harmless. But a lot of things you think are harmless are actually scary! You learn that over time, but you can accelerate the learning process by welcoming some danger, trusting your foresight, having the confidence to not always react to your opponents moves. Sometimes your opponents moves will be meaningless. You need to be able to trust your assesments of threats and not play your opponents game for them (which you can't, right now). If you calculate it as harmless: don't bother! If you calculate it as a threat: bother! I think lower rated players are too reactive like jellyfish or never reactive like meandering automotons grafted to a VR headset. You have to be able to calculate to know when and where to respond. I have fond memories of some game I played a long time ago as black in the fried liver... I didn't know the computer lines, but I ended up playing them because I didn't buy what white was selling- I had the confidence to see clearly. Less impressive here than with other openings, because there's really only ever one move, and of course now all the computer lines are rote, but that experience kind of opened my eyes to the often illusory quality of chess, that sometimes you can see through that illusion just by trusting your own mental power enough to put it to the proper specific use. But you can only get that if you know who can end the game and when!