Peculiar rating

So at this moment, I am thoroughly confused.

Somehow I peaked at 1600+, blitz rating, one year ago.  This was yearned by lots of work and time. I took it as a normal result. However, by some mystical circumstances, I dropped, way down to 1200. I started to analyze the games and I wasnt able to say what was weaker in my gameplay. The one thing I spotted was that my opponents were super smart for some reason. I was confused because at my local chess club I was also improving, I started to beat players that before I couldn't. All signs were showing I was getting better little by little, but according to my chess.com rating, I was degrading at chess. I had a tournament in my hometown, 2 weeks ago, where I performed at a 1500 FIDE rating, getting a nice place in women category. I mean, the FIDE rating is much harder to get than chess.com.

A few minutes ago, I played a chess.com live blitz 5-minute tournament. And I was confused further. Because I dropped to 1200, I never get the chance to play some better players, my usual opponents are 1100-1300 nowadays. So here I am, meeting these higher elo players.

I played vs:

-1424 blitz rating ( I won)

-1669 blitz rating ( I won)

-1818 blitz rating ( I won)

-1739 blitz rating (I won)

-1882 blitz rating (draw)

-2049 blitz rating (I lost)

How on earth, I struggle in a 1200 rating pool and still be able to get such wins, in a row. I mean, the rating difference is just too much. 

How should I evaluate my strength, I just dont know. 

Getting good play vs much higher elo:

Getting smashed by low rating:

Nice tournament performance and you're not the only one who is experiencing the ridiculous strength 1200- 1400 cc players have. To be really honest at some point I also felt like 1500 - 1700 pool is much more weaker than than the 1200- 1400. It does sound completely irrational(maybe it is). Idk exactly what the reason is one way to find the true strength of opponent is to check his profile and see the highest blitz/rapid rating. I did this on occasions when I found my opponents are playing super well I checked their highest ratings and to my shock I did found some of the players who had their highest rating at 1800 and above which is kinda heartbreaking that they lost so much rating points.

This is a bit funny but I remember sometimes thinking a 1300 a GM the way they were completely outplaying me after playing a bad opening.

I would recommend is not to play too many games on tilt this just adds on the frustation if you're not winning and play a limited amount of games in a day and slowly make your way back to 1700 territory.

One more thing that I noticed is not punishing your opponents questionable moves, in the games you shared in the ones you lost you didn't quite punished the questionable moves your opponent played in the first game not controlling the centre when your opponent was not, second game locking up the whole queenside in fact the queenside was the only place where you could play because your opponent is overextended there and you gave your opponent a nice kingside pressure and in the third game I could see you not having a clear plan.

Finding a refutation of the opponents questionable play is kinda hard and needs more time that can't be found in a 5+0 blitz game so there is that to consider as well. If you justify your opponents play then their seemingly bad moves justify their play which is frustrating if we still think they were bad.

My final thoughts are in the games you won your opponents played well and so did you, and in the games you lost your opponents played not no well and so did you.

There are far more as yet uncaught cheaters in the lower ratings, so you will often get smashed by people botting by stealth

Against 1 200 - 1 400 rated people you have 20 wins in blitz and 3 losses. 
Against 1 500 - 1 700 rated people you have 87 wins and 109 losses. 
So you probably lost to a lower rated opponent and then beat some higher rated one easily and drew such a conclusion.

@DianaMatiuschenko

I looked at your statistics and you win a lot more than you lose against 1 100 - 1 300 rated players, you have almost double the wins compared to losses.

And of course against higher rated people you win less than you do against lower rated people. 
But we all have wins against higher rated people and losses against some lower rated people. It is inevitable.

I agree however that in most cases someone rated 1 500 FIDE is usually somewhat higher rated on chess.com, though it varies from person to person. You could be a bit underrated at this moment.

As for tournaments here, people have a greater incentive to sandbag (which is of course illegal) in order to win the tournament in lower rating category. You will probably get games more in accordance to the actual rating in normal rated games.

You can thank Chat GPT and other AI/bot tools that lower ranked players seem to be using these days

Hi,
I'm not sure....I only looked at the three games you shared which were against lower rated players. I am not a good judge of rating, but the first two at least looked about right for what I remember 1200 blitz to be....the third one, I guess was an unfortunate blunder.
Is it possible that you are playing less seriously and/or tilting against lower rated blitz players?