You seem to be the only Knight whose rating is dropping due to training? What's wrong? :(
 

Perhaps it's a case of what goes down, must come up (lol)... I think I must be slipping into my old beginner approach in these blitz games, and just not feeling very alert.
 

Lots of people train and have their ratings drop: it is discussed all the time amongst the Knights. It is often a good sign that you are moving out of comfortable old cognitive patterns and into new and better ones, but have to pass through some bumpy terrain to get there.

There is an error landscape defined over a space different playing styles. In this landscape, you were at one local error minimum, and are traversing to another, lower local minimum, but the road to the lower minimum involves a little bit of sideways and uphill travel.

Or, the blitz has muffed up your game so you have bumped yourself into an old and comfortable local minimum with a higher error rating....
 

I think we all have are ratings drop and rise. It's a wierd thing.
I can win six in a row and then suffer six straight losses due to things like server disconnecting, mouse slips, playing while tired, having to quit the game to attend to my family....
It what the old Boston Red Sox coach Grady Little called Buzzard Luck. Take a look at my chart in my blog. The chart goes up and down but the trend line tends to go up and the lows are not quite as low . good luck . Jim
 

Well, i was told that improving comes in jumps. You get to a maximum, then go back down.. then after a while u play steadily around that maximum again. You aren't the only one, i got to a FICS high (standard) of 1886 quite easily.. now my rating just dipped below 1800 (1798). Also my FICS high blitz of 1656 went down to low 1600s. But you'll get there!
 

Thanks for the encouragement, gang. I am just going to focus on problems and OTB, which probably is the real secret to good blitz ;-).
 

Takchess, how dare you favorably cite Grady Little! His decision to leave in Pedro was the coaching equivalent of Buckner's error.

:)
 

I wouldn't scrutinize your blitz performance too much. I'd concentrate on your performance in longer games. Old MDLM states that you really shouldn't approach fast chess until you've reached the higher club levels and even expert. That being said, blitz is fun, and it's great way to get your chess fix when you need it.
 

My blitz rating is crashing as well, so I feel you pain.
 

I've found a semi-official term for our slumps during massive learning experiences. The person who runs my chess club comes from a teaching background and when I discussed this topic, smiled and readily assigned a name to it. He called it "Child Learning Theory." I don't know if that's the official term for it, but he said that when children learn new things, everything they have learnt prior gets temporarily jumbled until they incorporate the new information into their knowledge set. He said that this can apply to adults as well. So, it's normal AND it is A GOOD SIGN!!!