So... Does playing chess by itself actually improve your chess?

Playing only will get you frustrated..take time to study and analyse

I stopped playing for 10 years because i was too busy. I didn't play chess, read about it, or talk about it. I came back, played in two USCF tournaments and found my rating had gone up 200 pts. Go figure.

In my case playing lots of games did not help, or at least didn't help as much as training. The only thing that helped me was objectively analyzing where I needed to improve and then focusing on corrective measures. I found that I frequently would get a favorable position out of the opening, even against higher rated opponents, only to overlook a tactical shot by my opponent. I also found that I frequently failed to find a middle-game plan, lose the initiative and ultimately the game. So I spent more time working tactics puzzles and positional analysis. Also, I gave up blitz.

Analyzing games and learning chess book lines and using these in lichess gets you flagged as a computer assisted cheat - 2nd time I have had my account flagged - this site is just nuts, this coupled with how many +2200 plus players are on lichess (which puts them at the top range of their countries is just a joke. Check out the world ranking - lichess has more - so something stinks. Pareto analysis says use the 80 /20 rule so potentially 80% of lichess players are not being honest (or vice versa) but there seem to be a huge number of +2100 players

Rating range Category
2700+ World Championship contenders
2500–2700 most Grandmasters (GM)
2400–2500 most IM's & some Grandmasters (GM)
2300–2400 FIDE Masters (FM)
2200–2300 FIDE Candidate Masters (CM), most national masters
2000–2200 candidate masters, experts (USA)
1800–2000 Class A, category 1
1600–1800 Class B, category 2
1400–1600 Class C, category 3
1200–1400 Class D, category 4
below 1200 novices