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Winning and losing streaks - Is this place legit?

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Signal_Boost

I'm not the best at chess. I'll freely admit that. I'm not even very good. But I begin to question whether this place is legitimate or not because of the winning- / losing- streaks. It all seems very....weird.

I play a bunch of games and win. I gain 100 points in rating. Then, like clockwork, I drop those points in a couple of days. I spend two weeks trying to gain the points, then two days losing them.  But in one stretch I'll win 80% of my games, and in another stretch I'll lose 90% of my games (as right now). There seems to be very little balance. During the winning streaks and losing streaks, I'm not really playing anything significantly different - I'm the same player. But I've gotten to the point that when I reach a certain rating, I know that the losses are going to start coming fast and furious, and it doesn't really matter what I do or how I play.

I'm curious if anyone else experiences these winning- / losing- streaks. Maybe I'm just doing things wrong at times, and when I'm doing them right I'm not good enough to know it. But I've come back to chess after 20 years off, and I'm beginning to think I was better off not playing.

Any advice would be welcome?

MatrixDog
Sounds like tilt
Signal_Boost

Tilt?

aninda7479

Its not weird. If you pause your play and learn a lot of things and tactics you can make a win steak. I don't what is a loosing steak

I have 13 win steak in Rapid All Time

IMADEIT1000

Your chess ELO is correlated with psychology but over time it balances

marklovejoy

I am a firm believer in biorhythm theory. It would take me a loooong time to explain it in detail. It's enough to say that physically, emotionally, intellectually and intuitionally we all go through positive and negative halves of each cycle. And in each there are in particular very high and very low days as well as a "critical day" where you go from the positive half to the negative half of each cycle. For example, I have a book about the Fischer-Spassky match in 1972. Each player's birth date is given, which is what you need to graph (with a calculator or an app) where any particular day falls in each cycle. In game two Fischer forfeited by refusing to make a move within an hour after his clock was started. That day was the peak day for the negative half of his emotional biorhythm cycle. Spassky had a day when he was sick with a cold and took a medical postponement. That day his physical biorhythm was on either a critical day or the very low level of it. During the match his steadily declining quality of play was noted in the book. As I recall his intellectual cycle had crossed over into the negative half when the games began. With that one either half lasts for 16-17 days so the long string of draws during that time didn't give him the wins he needed to regain the lead. Perhaps this is what you're experiencing.