Is this chart:
A) My blitz rating on Playchess.com over the last 400 games.
B) The Dow Jones closing average for the past 6 months.
C) My mood indicator last night.
D) A and C.
Interestingly, B) is very similar as seen below.
Both graphs have a valley in the middle with a plummet on the right side.Perhaps it is fitting that TPS #13 is about bad luck. I had my own Black Monday playing on Playchess.com last night. My blitz rating started at 1772, briefly climbed to 1807, and then went into free fall. Thirty-three games later, my rating was 1534. Briefly it was 1495. That’s a 300-point loss, folks.
It’s hard to describe the funk that I was in. It was 1:30AM. I felt dehydrated, with a headache, but the compulsive-addictive person in me kept saying, “One more game will turn it around.” An obscure movie I remember renting in the 80s is “Lost in America”. Julie Hagerty loses a fortune on roulette and has to be pried away from the table, all the while saying, “22, 22, come on back.” I'm not that serious about internet blitz, but repeated failures started to get to me and I had a small taste of despair. I can only look to the meteoric rise about 150 games ago and hope that I have a rebound. What goes down, must come up, right?
It was hardly likely that I was going to turn it around. My chess ability had degenerated into myopic, tunnel vision. I was thinking one maybe two half-ply deep in openings that I didn’t understand.
Pushed out my third Endgame Obsession.
Annotated my first game of the Expert Championship.
Pushed my Chess Tempo Standard rating to 2243 and my Blitz rating to 2599. What good is tactics training if I decide to use only one ply of my internal chess engine?
2 comments:
Good thing you don't play for money. That much of a rating free fall perhaps ties into.... "I know I can win it all back on this hand!" One more game, just one more game.....
Good thing I don't live near any gambling.
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