<1000 blitz and my opponents feel impossibly good

I am rated around 900 and have been for about a year in 5 min blitz.

I don't take chess as seriously as I use to, lack of studying opening variations, and honestly just not putting time into it.

I know I'm not great and I make mistakes. However the people I am facing make perfect trades into the end game, make perfect tactical moves, it just seems unlikely that so many <1000 players can be so overwhelmingly strong.

I don't want to call it cheats, or anything, I just want to understand why under 1000 feels worse than some of the tournament play I have experienced at the 1400 and 1500 level.

Just seems impossible.

You dont see mistake doesn't mean he doesn't do mistakes.
It is usually hard for 1000 player to see mistakes of another 1000 players. But 2000 players will easily see mistakes of 1000 players, thereby becoming 2000. Same apply to 2800 human vs 3600 engines and so on.

Two common methods to improve vision. Most people do both but some prefer one over the other
1. Active learning-------->>review own games, solve tactics and learn pattern recognitions by your own.
2. Passive learning----->>learn courses and theories, books written by masters.

@JasonTerry if you run computer analysis against your games you'll see that you opponent makes A LOT of mistakes. It's just you make more :(

You miss some basic principles, like undefended pieces, checks, pins, forks, skewers.

You also resign way too much, on your level there is also a chance to win (and you skip on practicing endgames as well)

Play lots of tactics.
Literally, thousands of tactics. Anyone, on any chess site, will tell you to do so. It's the backbone of your chess skill.

I've grinded from 1300 till 1600 by just doing tactics (+150 points on chess.com as well)

You should also review your games (both on your own and then with Stockfish) to see your blind areas and where you can improve. Also, review the game until your first blunder, because sometimes it's not worth analyzing it till the end.

Google "how to analyze a chess game", there are good videos like one from Levy: youtu.be/ylpAHvPlafc

good luck.

I agree with #3 in that if you practice tactics you'll improve by leaps and bounds. I'll add that you should try to simplify once you gain a material advantage. Sometimes you hear "keep tension in the position", which is good advice to gain an advantage. Once you have an advantage though, trading pieces is just bringing you closer to pushing a pawn and making a queen. Your opponent has to find clever ways to avoid trades and create threats simultaneously, while all you have to do is point your pieces at pieces of equal value.

An add-on to the argument of @Splorer

Especially online it's favorable to trade down into an endgame, because we are usually dealing with shorter time formats. You don't wanna be ahead and then lose on time, just because someone told you to keep the tension.

This is something you'd also have to consider when you analyze your games. Stockfish might tell you that a rook trade is an inaccuracy, because the engine prefers to first solidify the position and trade rooks 5 moves later or so. I wouldn't worry too much about that. If I'm up a bishop and a pawn, I trade down as fast as possible into a winning endgame.

EDIT:
Also, I think you should improve your chess on slower time formats. Play 15+10 or something similar. If your pattern recognition isn't that developed yet, you need the time to see tactics.

Wow, all of this is great advice. Thanks everyone.

@JasonTerry here is my thought on chess rating: if you’re at a certain rating, then the strongest tactics you should find in game would be around your rating plus 200ish. Your current rating of 900 means you might not find many high rated blunders, but your opponents will find some. It also goes with making blunders; making blunders that have a rating of 300 less than your in game rating is uncommon, meaning that you’ll get less chances to play against blunders because of the range. This probably sounds all mixed together, so if you need clarification I’d be happy to help

@JasonTerry I'm not an expert but when I look at your history I do not see any computer analysis. Now, I am terrible at blitz and mostly focus on rapid, where I am only slightly less terrible, so you will not see analysis run on my blitz games, but you will see it on nearly all my rapids. Don't start with the computer analysis though, just go back through your moves and try to find at least your first key mistake and decide on a better move, then run the analysis and run through the "learn from my mistakes". Try really hard to come up with a good move before you ask for the engine's solution. If you don't understand the move recommended by the engine, turn on the local analysis and play through the line you get from the "best" move until you understand why that first move was good (sometimes it will be inexplicable to us, but usually you can learn quite a lot doing this).

For myself I found I cannot learn anything from blitz except maybe time management. I do enjoy it at times, at others I find it very frustrating as its just a lolscape of mutual blunders until one of us blunders into mate or hangs a major piece. But I've found my blitz does improve as my rapid improves. I play 15+10 and that gives you enough time for several really deep thinks, and its those deep think exercises that I feel the most improvement from. I also do quite a few tactics, sometimes I will spend 20-30 minutes contemplating a really hard one and those are the real growth moments I am proud of.