Tidal chess ratings

I love chess rather more than chess loves me. I love playing the game as a relentless amateur, but I don't love it enough to do the sort of careful study that would lead me to any sort of mastery. When it comes to strategy, I am forever saying, like Otto in A Fish Called Wanda, "What was the part in the middle?"

Back before computers, I used to belong to the Canadian Correspondence Chess Association. We played chess by postcard, one move per card. A game of any decent length could take 18 months to play. I had a fancy folder of flat game boards with little flat pieces that could be stuck into place, to track the 20 or so interminable games I had going.

Now it is shiny modern times, and if I wanted, I could go online whenever I want and play lightning chess games where each player has a timebank of maybe two minutes. That is a bit fast for my brain, however.

For the past decade I have been playing most of my chess on a site with the fetching name of Red Hot Pawn, You can play casual games, join tournaments, or even be on a team in a league. I usually have 30 or so games going at any given time.

I was looking over my game history, and I see I have won just a few more games than I have lost over this decade. This is reasonable, since as you win games your ratings improve, and they match you up with players with higher ratings than the players you were beating before. You get more ratings points when you beat a player who has a higher rating than you do, and fewer when you beat a lower-rated opponent.

But what has always puzzled me are the peaks and troughs--the winning streaks and the bleak weeks--of my game history. Over and over again I win a bunch of games and my rating climbs like the pitch of a roof, and then I go into a tailspin for five, eight, ten games. You would think the outcomes would be more evenly distributed, as at the left of the timeline, rather than clumping so much, so often:

Perhaps it is related to C.S Lewis' great insight in The Screwtape Letters about the Law of Undulation. As the senior devil in the book explains to the trainee devil:

Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal. (The Enemy’s determination to produce such a revolting hybrid was one of the things that determined Our Father to withdraw his support from Him.) As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation—the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. If you had watched your patient carefully you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life—his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty. The dryness and dullness through which your patient is now going are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship; they are merely a natural phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make a good use of it.

Not sure how this insight helps me play better chess, but it helps me (a little bit) reconcile to my timeline.