Are 150 points elo swings normal?

I have often found that I have wild elo swings on chess.com. Somedays I just feel unbeatable and have even taken out a 1900 player once. However I tend to have wild swings. Recently from 1450 I dropped to 1310s and have now got back to 1400+.

 

This is a regular feature for me. There are days when I just cannot win. I overlook everything, and consequently lose and so the elo drops by around upto 100+ in one day. Then over the next few days I climb back to where I was only to then have torrid days not much later.

 

I don't get it.

 

 

^ This comment above displays a little knowledge sure, but the level of ignorance it displays is beyond belief.

sure 150 chess.com rating swings are common.

That used to happen to me a lot then I just limited the amount of games I played each day and didn't play when I felt really tired or had a headache and it stabilized 

If you want to be a pompous know-it-all, at least try to get it right.

Chess.com is what you could call a closed rating circuit, not a rating system like Elo or Glicko.

I thought chess.com used Glicko

pretty sure they do

I have dramatic swings too. Avoid playing much on days you can't win, and ride out days where you are "unbeatable". I think that faster time control chess allows for more "swings" in rating. These swings vary for each person, but 150 is quite a bit. Sometimes I may swing 50 or so, with exceptions, but in blitz.

Short answer: yes, it is perfectly normal, it is in fact expected. 

Online chess ratings are harmful to the healthy psychology of a diligent chess student, you must disassociate yourself from the numbers on a day to day basis and constantly be in-tune with long-term progress.

If we were to gain less than a point for a win, and lose less than a point for a loss, we wouldn't experience 5-10% changes in our rating on a daily basis.  We would have more appreciation for the slow grind.  We humans are always looking for instant radical improvement.  Online chess ratings change with far too much magnitude.  It is easy to gain or lose 150 points playing blitz in a couple of hours, but no player in existence could actually improve 150 points of actual skill in a day, or even a month for that matter.

So it is probably impossible for chess.com to even consider such a drastic change, but I think if online ratings were to change at a much slower rate (10 times slower or more!) It would lead to a much healthier atmosphere, less emotionally upset players, less unrealistic expectations being crushed.  Much smaller swings and less instances of our brains being cheaply manipulated, assigning way too much weight to drastic changes in the numbers 

I think people are making the mistake of thinking the rating is a measure of your skill. It’s not (although of course it would be correlated with skill to some degree). It’s a rating based on performance and results. Since it measures form, it’s natural for it to swing, because our form swings—just like for a footballer. Even Messi can have a bad day or bad month (okay, maybe not Messi...) Swings in form, or chess rating, don’t mean you’re suddenly getting better or worse at chess.

The reason top players’ ratings don’t change as drastically has to do with a lot of things, including the fact that they are mainly playing opponents with very similar ratings to theirs. Ben Finegold recently mentioned this is why they sometimes avoid playing events like the Olympiad where you could have a bad few days, lose to much lower rated opponents, and suddenly see your rating plummet.

I disagree with that, i was stuck on 950 rating for a month, and then poof, i got better made a breakthrough, and in one month my rating became 1200, 150 points in 2 weeks, and i see the difference, one month ago i couldn't beat just about any 1000, now i contest with 1200 without any problems, i started learning from my mistakes quicker and my rating hopefully will keep going up the same way

I always have days where in win 10 in a row and am beating people 500 points above my rating and days that i lose 10 in a row to people who dont know what en passant is. Its usually affected by have u been exercising or did you have macdonalds or chicken rice and brocoli for lunch. Being healthy usually means your brain is healthy and you will be more alert while playing chess

So true. I am a total basket case when I play, so I usually play bots haha

I don't think Jayesh was being a pompous know-it-all. A chess.com rating has a definite relationship to elo. In fact, the large pool of players encountered may make it more relevant. 

31,000 blitz games from op, wow. And the graph is really spiky up and down, there’s a bunch of players like this but I have no idea there problem, they just fluctuate indefinitely at a certain rating 

isn’t playing anymore :/

Perfectly normal. I managed to lose about that many points in one game recently.

Normal and common.