It certainly feels that way. I wonder if other players feel that there are tremendous variations in their ability to "see" the board. I wonder "chess tactics" is some sort of sensitive test neural functioning. Emrald.com posts the last hundred puzzles of all their players. Some, but not all, seem runny.
comments from others?
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I've noticed how my tactics performance is linked to stress (e.g. at work), or the lack thereof, even before I realize I am stressed! I can map holidays (and probably deadlines, if I kept the dates) onto the graph and it makes perfectly sense. Ups and downs are perfectly normal, but extended streaks now tell me something is up in my life.
PS: I only play about three problems a day, so my mapping is over an extended period.
I am an experimental psychologist looking for an explanation of the runniness of my performance on the chess tactics puzzles. A phenomenon is "runny" when it tends to have sequences of high and low values, rather than the values being distrubuted at random. I am considering two theories for why my performance is runny: (1) Something about the manner in which the problems is presented ... hard and easy problems come in runs or (2) Something about my abilities varies in a "runny" manner. If the latter, then it seems to be that the phenomenon is psychologically interesting and perhaps we chess playing psychologists ought to look into it. Unless, of course I am the only one to which this happens. I should say that my performance is runny on all tactics sites I have tried.
Thoughts please? Please reply to above user name at Clarku.edu.
Thanks,