Is there any chance that a 1300 rated player can beat a 2700 rated player?

referring to potential player winning a gm, which is great, but is that where the story ends?

The OP's op.

The chance is better than zero. There's a 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% chance, approximately.

I may be short one or two zeros. 

@Stephenson2 it was a tournament hosted by one of the chess clubs I go to. There is only one section, and the player strength within the section usually ranges from a "floor master" (a national master who has lost it a bit as he's aged and now has trouble staying above his 2100 floor- I've only played him once but with any luck he will soon become my highest-rated victim haha) to a 1100 type player. There are a bunch of 1600-2000 players there. But yeah if you're playing in a major open tournament, that sort of upset would only be possible with someone playing about two sections up.

dpnorman: Because you would probably have to win 30 games in a row to get your rating up that high in that short a period of time from a non-provisional rating :)

I actually think the chance of a 1300 beating a 2700 is higher than most people do; but I try to stay unbiased. When I see claims of people beating 2000s as 1400s, I will certainly investigate the most plausible explanations first.

We established the number of zeros after the decimal a few pages back. Maybe page 40. Maybe 25.

@Elubas Nope. I've just been playing a lot of higher-rated players and having results above my rating in my tournaments. If I had won 30 games in a row against higher-rated players, I would be much higher haha.

If anyone has heard of Wolfram|Alpha, it has a win percentage chance calculator - just input the ELO ratings you'd like to compare. It estimates the likelihood of a 1300 winning a match up vs. a 2700 to be 0.0316% (roughly 1/3164). Bear in mind it's a theoretical calculator only! In reality I would personally expect the odds to be even lower than that, I just thought some of your folks minght find it interesting.

Link: http://goo.gl/NLrlCk

As far as actually sitting across the board from a really great player, and it happens to be a 2700!!! I would be very grateful for the time and less concerned of winning as I am of learning.

Analysis of actual results have demonstrated that the higher player underperforms relative to Elo predictions up to about 500 Elo difference, but then after a 500 point difference, the higher rated player performs significantly better than the predictions.

Well... I'm happy I put my time to good use. Until next thread... however long that takes. Hopefully you can all get through standard deviation class, as far as me I'm going to play chess. :)

I would love to see the data they use to calculate it because I dont believe it is that "high."

I, as a 776 player, once beat a 2700 chess master .... of course, we were playing horseshoes!

That's an interesting point. I haven't come across any analyses on that before but I'll take your word for it. The calculator certainly wouldn't be taking into account differences in contextual performance like that^... I wonder how its predictions would change if it did? Very interesting :)

There both a citation to and discussion of a research article that presents the data a few pages back in this thread. It was maybe six months ago. There's also a link to the article.

I definitely agree with you, the chance is probably even lower, however that calculator is based on the equations underpinning the ELO rating system not an actual analysis of data. It's mathematical and conceptual only - reality is definitely going to be different! If we analysed proper data I'm sure the chance would be even lower than the ~1:3164 it predicts but for the sake of simplicity and for anyone interested I thought that calculator was relevant (even through it's probably not 100% accurate). As we seem to agree, reality would probably give an even smaller win-likelihood to the poor 1300.

"As we seem to agree, reality would probably give an even smaller win-likelihood to the poor 1300."

Well, it seems just as speculative to insist the prediction is false as it is to insist that the prediction is true.

It pretty much does just come down to the number of mistakes players make in the end. A 2700 doesn't make a lot of them; that's what got them there. A 1300 makes a lot of them; that's what got them there. The harder the opponent for the 1300, the more this gets punished. The task becomes harder and harder for the 1300, but I don't see why this can't be measured mathematically. So for a 1300 to beat a 1500, they would have the same difficulties as say a 1400, but even more so. I don't really get why this logic changes if we kept going further. It's not like the value of 100 points increases as time goes on. So the 2700 suddenly plays like a 3500 when playing a 1300? No, their skill is just obviously much higher than the 1300, which is why the prediction is as low as it is (1 in 3164 is extremely low).

It seems like people want to inflate the strength of the 2700 just because the encounter is lopsided. If the difference in strength was really that high then the rating system would stretch out more. You'd have people who really do have a 1 in 3164 chance of losing to a 1300; then those people would be the 2700s, and maybe the Carlsen's would be at 4000. In any case 1 in 3164 is virtually unbeatable anyway.

I dont believe it.1300´s have good and bad days, same with the GM. 

Magnus Carlsen blundered against Anand in a WCgame, and Anand blundered back, he didnt see it. The GM´s are not overhuman supergods. They too make mistakes,

and a skyrocketing 1300 on the way up (maybe actual strenght closer to 1900) does play at his best some days, and that can be fantastic chess.

One day a 1300 can play as a 2000, and at a very bad day a GM can play as a 1800. A Gm can also test a line he doesnt know well yet, and be punished on that.

I had a game when I was at878N-Elo , fideunrated, when I with black outplayed a 1800fide, and mated him in 78 moves. I played fantastic, and he wasnt bad. His mistake was that he did not try to play for a draw when I opened absolutely smooth. That day I was better. I played like 2000. A GM could have done a similar mistake.

Most players are theirselves worst enemy. If they are playing their best, they can beat almost anybody. If not, they can loose to almost anybody.

It was established earlier in the thread(I obviously dont expect you to read all of it) that the 1300 player is a true 1300 player.... But as for your example, a GM will not make the same mistake as an 1800 player. You could have played at a 2200 level and a GM will still have an easy time with you.

No one is inflating the strength? But, the difference is that high. You realize GMs dispose of 2200 rated players with ease right?

Well, they're much higher rated, I would expect GMs would score quite well against 2200s. But there are probably times where the 2200 would get some chances or the GM might have trouble not allowing a draw, something like that. Like we all do occasionally against players 300-400 points lower than us.

You would pretty much have to inflate the understood strength of the 2700 if the odds of the 2700 beating the 1300 were higher than what the rating system would predict.

Think about how weird this is. So a 1500 has some x chances of beating a 1300, whatever the rating system says, it seems like people agree with smaller differences like this. Ok, and so the 1600 has even higher chances of beating the 1300. And the 1700 has higher chances of beating the 1300. This should all increase incrementally. But if you are to make the argument that the 2700 has better odds of beating the 1300 than as the ratings would predict, you'd have to at some point, arbitrarily, inflate things. Maybe some would say, oh well once you get to 1800, 1300s simply can't win, cause the difference is just too high. Ok... well, why then is it that when you're 1700 they can win, but when you become 1800 you're immortal? You're not immortal, you just have better odds at beating the 1300 than the 1700 because 1800 players are better than 1700s. The odds just go up a normal amount. If you do this instead with 1900s and not 1800s, it's still arbitrary -- what is it that is so different about a 1900 and 1800 that makes a 1900 losing impossible, but an 1800 winning merely "unlikely?" Or you could cut it off with 2000s, or 2100s, etc, but it's the same problem.

Granted this does not take into account the psychological nature of huge rating differences like this. If the odds of a 2700 player beating a 1300 player or scoring a certain amount of points is higher/lower than what the rating system predicts, it could be for psychological reasons. Other reasons don't initially look plausible.