Tactics Binge

This morning I became obsessed with solving puzzles on chess.com. For some of them, I spent a few minutes calculating. For others, I moved almost instantly, believing the puzzle was simple pattern recognition. Errors were frequent. When I failed a puzzle, I tried again, working it until I found the answer. One puzzle was ridiculously easy. As it came after failing four of the previous five, I had the sense that the site’s programming is designed to poke fun at me.

White to move

At this point, I had solved six correctly and failed eight. My tactics rating had dropped 35 points.

As the session continued, my rating kept going down, then up a bit, then down again.

When I finally quit, I had attempted 169 puzzles. My rating rose three points from 3036 to 3039. At one point, I had dropped as low as 2939.