A little while ago I checked my USCF rating for May and sadly, after playing for the past two years, I’ve plummeted from 1650 to 1470. That is nearly a two-hundred point drop from last year. Just a little reminder to myself that my goal for 2015 was to gain 200 points and break into the class A ranking. So now I am four-hundred points off of my intermediate goal and farther than ever away from the master status. The only good news out of this is that I now qualify to enter the “under 1500” section in the upcoming Massachusetts Open. However, I need to be mindful of the fact that my downward spiral is largely due to several losses playing against the younger players with ratings under 1400. I also should remember that I have only recently begun to play in chess tournaments after a twenty-five year layoff, and it is quite possible that I am not as strong as I was in 1989.