My rating dropped 200 points this week. What happened?

November 7, 2026 · 6 min read

The post shows up on Reddit almost every week. Someone was at their best rating a few days ago, then lost game after game, and now sits a couple of hundred points lower. They ask whether they suddenly got worse, whether the site is broken, or whether they should quit for a while.

The most upvoted answers usually say two things. First, calm down: this happens to everyone. Second, if it keeps happening, something in the way you play right now is costing you points, and you can find it.

Most of the time, it is variance

Your rating is not a measure of how well you play. It is the site’s current guess, updated after every game. Lichess uses a system called Glicko-2, which also tracks how sure it is about your rating: when you are new, or when you have not played for a while, your rating moves faster after each result.

On top of that, you are matched against players close to your rating. Each of those games is close to a coin flip with a small edge, so a run of losses is not rare. A bad streak of a few days can move you a long way down, and a good one will move you back up. If you look at your rating graph over months instead of days, a drop like this often looks like a normal dip in a line that is still going up.

So the first question is not “what is wrong with me?” but “is this drop different from the ones I had before?”. If your graph has had dips like this before, and you came back from them, this one is probably the same.

When it is not just variance

Sometimes the drop does have a cause. These are the ones that come back most often in those threads:

Tilt. You lose a game, you click “new game” right away to win the points back, you play faster and angrier, and you lose again. Most big drops in one evening come from this.
Fatigue. Late-night sessions, playing after a long day, or playing while doing something else. Your moves get worse long before you feel tired.
A new time control. Moving from rapid to blitz, or from blitz to bullet, changes what kind of mistakes you make. The rating you lose there is not your rapid level.
A new opening. Switching to a line you do not know yet costs points for a while, because you leave the book early and reach positions you do not understand.
One recurring problem. The same opening keeps going wrong, the same kind of opponent keeps beating you, or you keep losing on time from good positions.
Too many games, no review. Playing a lot without looking back means the same mistake can cost you points again and again in the same week.

First, stop the slide

Before you look for a cause, stop losing points. The players who answer these threads with the most experience almost all have some version of the same rules:

Set a stop rule and keep it. For example: after two or three losses in a row, you stop for the day. Decide it before you play, not in the middle of a bad session.
Take a real break. A day or two without rated games is often enough to break a tilt streak.
Do not chase the points back the same night. The game you start to “win it back” is the one you are most likely to lose.
Play slower for a while. If you dropped in blitz, play some rapid games. More time on the clock means fewer of the mistakes that come from rushing.

Then, look at your last games

Once you have stopped, open your last thirty games or so, the ones from the drop and a few from before it. You are not looking at each game in depth. You are looking for one pattern, by asking a few plain questions:

Do the losses share an opening? If most of them start the same way, the problem may be there.
Do they share a time of day? Many players lose far more late at night than they think.
Do they share a kind of mistake? A hanging piece, a missed threat, a won position thrown away.
Did you lose on time, or in time trouble, from positions that were fine?
Did you play them one right after the other, without a pause?

Usually one or two of these stand out. That gives you a cause you can work on, which is much better than a vague feeling that you got worse. If it is the opening, learn the right move in the position that keeps going wrong. If it is the time of day, stop playing at that hour. If it is the same kind of mistake, ask yourself one question before each move that would have caught it.

The honest part: this takes time

Going through thirty games and sorting them by opening, hour and type of mistake is slow work. Done properly, with each loss checked on an engine, it takes hours, and you need to do it again after the next bad week.

That is why most players skip it. They feel the drop, they play more to fix it, and the same cause takes more points the next day. The review is the step that actually ends the slide, and it is also the step that gets dropped first.

When you have no time, ask the question directly

There is a shorter way to get most of the answer. Ask the question the way you would ask a friend who watched your games: “what changed in my last games?”, “why did I lose so many games this week?”, “what keeps going wrong in my blitz?”, and watch a short video that answers it on your own positions.

That is what Chess X-Ray does. It reads your chess.com or Lichess games, finds the moments where you lost the most, checks them with Stockfish, and explains them in a few minutes of video: the move you played, the one you missed, and the idea behind it, in plain words. Because it looks at many games at once, it can tell you whether your losses this week share a cause, or whether it really was just a bad run.

It does not replace the stop rule or the break. No video will help if you keep playing tilted at two in the morning. But once you have stopped the slide, it saves you the slowest part of the review and points you at the one thing worth fixing.

A simple routine after a bad week

Tonight: stop. No more rated games until tomorrow at the earliest.
Tomorrow: look at your last games for one pattern, or ask the question and watch the video.
The next days: fix that one thing, play at a slower time control, and keep your stop rule.

The short version

A drop of a hundred or two hundred points in a week is common. Look at your graph over months before you worry.
New or less active ratings move faster, so a few results can change a lot.
If it is more than variance, check for tilt, fatigue, a new time control, a new opening, or one recurring problem.
Set a stop rule, take a break, and never chase the points back the same night.
Look for one pattern in your last games, fix it, and play slower for a while.

If you just switched sites and your number looks different, read why your Lichess and chess.com ratings differ. If the losses go back further than this week, read why do I keep losing at chess.