I have been away from OTB for a while so I just play online blitz at the moment. Some days I will lose a ton of games and another day I will win a ton. My environment across those two days has not changed even though I realize that some of my opponents could be taking things less seriously on the day I win or some of them have hit the beer already given time differences. Nevertheless it got me thinking about performance in OTB.

Some days I think we are not up for it, mentally and physically, just like a football team that is not up for it on the day and is not sharp. Worse, we don't get to choose the days we compete on, other than dropping out after doing badly in say the first two rounds. If you have not got many slow time control tournaments in your area you really have to play. If the tournament day is one of those where you are not really up for the competitive fight and are not sharp then things will go badly as for any competitive team. (When I say not up for the fight, I mean that we think we are but end up in the middle of the first game for example and we just don’t have it today.) Over my OTB life I have had 4/4 scores and 0/4 scores in OTB play.

As I read what I wrote above I realize this might be stating the obvious.

Gerry

There can be massive swings at GM level too, especially those GM's who's style leads to quite high variance in results, and who tend to pack in a lot of events. I remember playing some Indian GM and his rating was only 2380 or something like that. Somebody told me the year before he was around the 2500 mark.

If we're talking class players, it's really no big deal.  I actually skipped the "1600s"; I jumped from 1599 to 17-hundred-something because I lucked out and scored 4/4 in one tournament!  In that one, I legitimately played well and beat two A-players, but an overrated Master and another 1800ish player blundered against me and lost (probably from underestimating me).  In my case though, I was improving rapidly and my rating continued to climb (I only played about 12 rated games a year in those days).

So a couple of lucky wins or unfortunate blunders are all it takes to have huge rating swings at that level.

I had a rating "swing" of minus 75 points in only 8 days recently! 
My brain wasn't working properly, and the tournament had a very high coefficient (K factor). I really don't want to withdraw from tournaments unless there's some concrete, physical illness (to date only 1 single tournament), but maybe this is a principle I should abandon!?

On the plus side, I expect I'm now slightly underrated and should swing back up eventually - this is always more fun 

Hello All:

I have seen class players sometimes have ratings swings of over 100 ratings points in a year. I know online blitz is very different but even there I have swings of 100 points myself in very short periods.

Any thoughts on these big swings for OTB players? 

Thanks,

Gerry