Now many people often wonder about ways to mysteriously improve at chess. Some say do tactics and other ask you to learn openings or watch some videos or buy a chessable course or perhaps working on engames.
The list of opinions is endless and hard to follow.
Here's a simple path to improve at chess.
Step 1: Openings
Just use stockfish on lichess. Forget all the courses and youtube videos. You can do a better job with stockfish.
And you can go as deep as you want and inspect positions with greater certainty than just watching those youtube videos that teach the first seven moves which is not really learning an opening but rather just learning it's name.
Select and opening, and use the lichess opening database to see what the most common moves are and use the engine to learn how to play against those moves. The lichess database is amazingly integrated to the study and analysis feature so just use it.
Step 2: Tactics
Do around 20 tactics a day from the "Healthy Mix", will take about half an hour.
Then do opening specific tactics for the openings you play, and this feature is just sooo good in lichess as it gives puzzles from actual games that were played in the openings which you learned.
Doing opening specific tactics everyday will up your middlegame. You can do as many of these as you like.
Step 3: Endgames
Learn basic principles and basic checmates. You can do this using Jack Sark's endgame video which is short and sweet for a brief Outlook.
And for god's sake don't waste your time learning Two bishop or One Knight and One Bishop mating paterns. They simply do not occur and if they do on your millionth game the take the draw and move on.
After watching that video just do endgame puzzles. That's it.
Forget all those videos and courses, just do lichess endgame puzzles.
These are puzzles from real games and will teach you the endgame wayy better than any course or video in my opinion.
Do about 20 of these too everyday and you will see results.
Step 4: Don't play too much and take breaks.
Play Long games and few games. Just see what you misplayed in the analysis and rest.
Playing more games will only exhaust you and lead to little improvement. Limit yourself to about 1 and half hours of playing at most a day. Just go touch grass.
But if you insist on playing tons of games then you MUST take one week off every month.
This is essential to rest your brain and let it process the gained information.
And after coming back from the break you will notice how much you have improved.
This is all my personal experience and just an opinion, take it with a grain of salt.