Getting worse

I started playing on this site a few months ago and sucked at the beginning. But after playing for a while I started to get the hang of things and was winning more games than I was loosing and rocketed up in elo. My rank isn't that important to me but I've been loosing and blundering left and right the last month or so and have dropped like 600 to low 400's in a week. I keep messing up and getting outplayed no matter how many strategies or games I play. Its really hitting my ego in a negative way.:/

 

any tips?

learn the key principles of chess, get familiar with the pieces and the board, and maybe even take a break if you're tired. after that, you'll improve but it wont be instant.

Firstly pat yourself on the back and give yourself a break. You’ve done well and everyone has bad games, bad days, even bad weeks!
You won’t be able to get good games if you’re beating yourself up about the last bad one, trust me I know.

I sit anywhere from 1350 to 1450 in ten minute games and go through patches where I drop down to 1250 depending on tiredness, stress and everyday grief.

When that happens I go back to playing the computer starting at lvl 0, do the puzzles, analyse moves and generally focus on seeing threats before they happen rather than going on the offensive.

Take a break. Slow down. Accept that you aren’t going to beat Magnus this week and gradually you will get out of the rut. Most importantly - don’t beat yourself up 🥸

Well Spoken

I have such big swings that often I get accused of cheating...which is a joke at my rating...but the point is we all have periods of laser focus and total blunderheadishness. it's a game in the end

Dear ParkYup,

I am a certified, full-time chess coach, so I hope I can help you.  Everybody is different, so that's why there isn't only one general way to learn. First of all, you have to discover your biggest weaknesses in the game and start working on them. The most effective way for that is analysing your own games. Of course, if you are a beginner, you can't do it efficiently because you don't know too much about the game yet. There is a built-in engine on chess.com which can show you if a move is good or bad but the only problem that it can't explain you the plans, ideas behind the moves, so you won't know why is it so good or bad.

You can learn from books or Youtube channels as well, and maybe you can find a lot of useful information there but these sources are mostly general things and not personalized at all. That's why you need a good coach sooner or later if you really want to be better at chess. A good coach can help you with identifying your biggest weaknesses and explain everything, so you can leave your mistakes behind you. Of course, you won't apply everything immediately, this is a learning process (like learning languages), but if you are persistent and enthusiastic, you will achieve your goals. 

In my opinion, chess has 4 main territories (openings, strategies, tactics/combinations and endgames). If you want to improve efficiently, you should improve all of these skills almost at the same time. That's what my training program is based on. My students really like it because the lessons are not boring (because we talk about more than one areas within one lesson) and they feel the improvement on the longer run. Of course, there are always ups and downs but this is completely normal in everyone's career. 

I hope this is helpful for you.  Good luck for your chess games! 

ur not getting worse, ur just have a bad period of chess play. 

Just play, it'll get better after a while. U will never be consistent, ur human, not a robot. 

Accept it

 

+1 Actually, the math underlining the rating system is prone to many rating swings. As stated, we are not robots, so human players can swing several hundred points up or down in a week or two just because of little things like lack of sleep, lack of nutrition, mood, mindset, or many other factors. 

If anything, the "grind" up the rating ladder gets significantly tougher at the higher levels. The higher rated, then the further you could potentially fall  

The key to recognize is that you are not "worse" because you dropped rating one day. It isn't like you unlearn stuff you knew. It is just a rating number (and estimate at that!) and objectively means nothing during the game itself. Try to keep the mindset on learning and improving your overall chess ability and then the rating will eventually follow your improvement. 

p.s. First-hand experience on this one. I just dropped like 60 rapid rating points yesterday (got back about 20 today, but doubt I'd play more games later today due to my schedule). 

Whenever you "reach" a milestone, then no one can take away the fact that you were there - even if your current rating dips below it temporarily.