Something weird is going on with the players I am facing

I was rated 1900-2000 on Rapid for a very long time. Recently, I was a bit tired and I lost a lot of games and my rating dropped to 1800. And then it got even worse and I dropped to 1750.

I took a break and came back ready to get my rating back up, but I facing loads and loads of players now in the 1700 range and they are playing extremely well. I wont say anything suspicious, but I can only say that they are putting up 88-90% accuracy and just as good as the 1900 rated players I was playing last week!

What is going on? Any thoughts?

Has the rating system been changed on rapid lately, to make it closer to the Blitz ratings?

Am I just being unlucky with the players I play?

youre just being unlucky/playing worse.

keep playing and enjoy the game over time your rating will rebound.

thanks for the reply. I will take your word for it. I just finally won a game again, against a player rated a lowly 1720, lol. I just checked the analsyis and their accuracy was 88% and they forced me to play 91% (est 2300 rating!) just to get a win.

I played an OTB tournament last weekend and had the following accuracies

•  89.4 as black against white at 76.7
•  91.4 as white against black at 79.9
•  93.1 as white against white at 97.8

I'm well below 1800 strength.

Accuracy here is graded on a curve and isn't exactly what most people think it is. There are a lot of things that can influence it.

https://support.chess.com/article/1135-what-is-accuracy-in-analysis-how-is-it-measured

Right, but OTB ratings are well known to be 200 points, maybe 300 points lower than chess.com rapid. Right?

Also, OTB means you have a lot of time ? I am playing 10-0 games

Thanks for the reply!

Just got another beat down from a supposedly 1745 player who was playing the Grob. He had 91.3% accuracy and an estimated 2250 rating. The Grob is not exactly a regular opening either. I mean, I dont expect to win every game easy but it is not much fun to lose 20 games in 2 days and drop over 200 ratings points. What is this??

Maybe I should cancel my subscription and set up a new account and see if I can get some real opponents again

I get more satisfaction from a game where both sides play very well (even if I need to play extremely well just to hold a draw) than having someone just make a lot of simple mistakes, letting me win easily.

Maybe you just hit a few opponents who are rapidly improving or underestimated their beginning strength. Have you looked at their ratings some time after playing them to see if they have turned into much stronger players?

Sure that would make sense if it was just one player, or 2, or even 3. But virtually everyone I am facing in the 1700 range is playing just as well as the 1900 players from last week! And I have played 10K games on here. I know what it is like

could be, but this change happened in one week

Time control isn't really going to make a ton of difference. The way accuracy works is the majority of games, unless they're just bad, are going to be between 75-90% accuracy.

Just played another guy rated (supposedly) 1730. He destroyed me when I tried the Sicilian dragon. 94% accuracy, 1 min and 3 seconds used to play 17 movies, and an estimated rating of 2400

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