Completed the course awhile ago, but took a long break from chess and played mostly bullet for fun. Then, recently I got back to playing Rapid chess consistently and just broke 1500.

Just wanted to share what helped me personally:

0. Nelson’s course – obviously. It is balanced very well for this specific purpose, and I’m grateful to Nelson for both putting up this course, as well as doing the speedrun videos on YouTube.

1. Actually, taking time to calculate and evaluate threats in the position – by asking yourself questions, for example “if I attack the knight, where would it go? can it fork me somehow?”, “what does my opponent want?” etc. This is also what helped me start making less blunders.

2. Don’t give up in losing positions. I was losing a lot of ELO earlier because I either resigned too early, or just mentally gave up and didn’t do my best. The truth is, at our level, people are not that good at converting winning positions. If you give your opponent enough time, they can make mistakes, they can blunder, or they can burn too much time and get flagged.

3. Staying focused during the game. Some of my losses were due to the fact that I wasn’t fully in the game – my mind was distracted and thoughts were elsewhere. As soon as I started creating conditions where nothing disturbs me, I started seeing less blunders.

4. Playing less games a day. Recently, I decided to play only one game per day. This prevents me from getting fatigued and losing games because my concentration isn’t there. Besides, this allows me to dedicate more time to analyzing my games.

5. Aman Hambleton Stonewall speedrun. Hope that’s ok to recommend external resources. Aman has a speedrun on his Chessbrah YouTube channel where he plays only Stonewall (both as White and Black). This was useful for me to master my Stonewall, because over 19 videos him playing at different levels you’ll see all kinds of positions and it was very interesting to see how a GM would approach those positions.