The reason I stopped playing chess was because I reached the point where the only way to get better was memorizing openings and gambits and such. And really, that’s how you master it. Spend tens of thousands of hours playing, practice hundreds of specific sequences. There are books that teach you all those sequences and drop some theory about them.

A month in, general practice is more important than theory and gambits. Play hundreds of games against the easy computer, get a feel for the dynamics of the pieces. I like blitz chess (short timed games, like 5 minutes) because it forces you to not take slow calculated moves. Eventually tick the difficulty up a little bit, and try to find the level where your win-loss rate is 50:50.

Don’t be afraid to lose, just pay attention to how you lose, and try to figure out how not to do it the same way again. Once you roughly dial in your rating, start digging into the gambits and stuff. Put enough hours into that, and keep increasing the difficulty to provide a challenge, and you’re on your way to mastery. Basically just keep practicing theory and playing an obsessive number of games.

But where you’re at now, I’d just play blitz games against the easy bot until you have specific things you want to improve.