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

I can beat Houdini with initially being a queen up, so if I can get the 2700 rated guy drunk somehow and play a game with him right after that, may be he will hang his queen and then I can win!

However the probability of even that happening is 0.001. LOL :)

But what if the 1300 plays an opening line he has spesialized perfect the first 23 moves, and the Gm misses some theory?

(a 1300 can have one or two openings that is perfectionized, and if he is lucky, he can use them, out of luck, he cant, and then he will loose most games to 1400+)

When you are ruling out the 1300´s that is not true 1300, you are ruling out a lot  of the 1300´s. A 1300 is usually a learning player on the way up, and he or she might be 9 years old. A 9 year old 1300 is very often beating players above 1600. Those kids can calculate ten times faster than an adult 1800 and also have talents ten times higher, and started playing chess earlier.

The normal Fiderated otb-playingadult, whose rating is somewhat settled, is rated between 1500 and 1900. Below 1500 (like me), he/she is  quite fresh (learning), and above 1900 I consider as very good and above normal strenght. So most players at 1300 are learning chess, and among those learning there are a lot of kids, and most kids are underrated because they are on the fasttrack up.

Actually there are only two players of the 110 in my club that is close to 1300. One is 11 years old at 1266 and the other is ca 40 years at 1368. Most of the superkids jumps directly to 1400+ the first time they get fiderating.

The fact that most superkids jumps directly to 1400+, rules out most of the superkids, so that tells me that the chance of a 1300 beating a 2700 is less than I thought.

The player that is around that strenght, or a bit above (Norwegian  elo 946), that is fantastic in one spesific opening, has not got fiderating yet. He is a comebackadult.

It's been noted a couple of times, but bears repeating for those joining late. There are a few here who can name every 2700+ player. There are about four dozen. 2700s routinely beat ordinary GMs. They are the world's elite.

If the 1300 player and the 2700 player continues to play a sufficiently large number of games, sooner or later one of them falls asleep and loses on time.

I believe that a 1300 can beat a 2700 player under special circumstances, such as...

the 2700 didn't get enough sleep and is too tired to stay awake, the 2700 player is too distracted by something, such as the TV, etc.

I am rated under 2000 and can beat most 1300s most of the time with minimal effort even when I am drunk AND tired AND playing a simul. How do you think the top 45 players in the world would do?

Fill him full of vodka and poke out his eyes, he will still win at least nineteen games in a twenty board simul against 1300s. The other game ended in a draw because the 1300 knew the opening cold 25 moves deep.

For me it's kind of weird. Like half the time against somewhat weaker players I will indeed win easily, and psychologically I want to tell myself, yeah this is why I'm rated higher. But then in the other half things aren't so easy, the position might be equal for a while, and sometimes things just go wrong in my position. Although, I do end up winning, somehow, in the end usually. It is kind of weird though how if I look at one game against a lower rated player where I won easily, it can make things look one way, but then I can also come up with examples where I struggled against lower rated players, and it sends such a different picture. There's a lot of variance in chess.

lol, no.

I've tried to imagine would it would take for me to lose against a very poor player. Such torture I wouldn't wish on anyone. What it boils down to is as long as the 2700 player has the will to focus, he will win. Only if the torture is so great that they lose the will to play decent moves will they lose... and that's not a real game anyway.

Staying up 72 hours plus drunk plus sick plus being mauled by a wild animal... yes, lets say their arm is being literally eaten. None of that matters if they still want to win.

I think it seems odd because ratings are just estimates. What counts is what makes up that player specifically. E.g. how good is their calculation, their general decision making, their opening knowledge, time management, endgame knowledge and on and on.

Also the ratings are fit to a continuous curve. I.e. there are limitless divisible segments. Like saying you go half way to 2000, then half way again over and over but you'll never get there.

In reality there are indivisible segments (so to speak). In reality maybe you can "half-way" learn the luncea position, but you can't learn 1/346th of it. So there is a point where just one more piece of knowledge or skill covers the last chance a lower rated player has to even get chances against you. Given a sufficiently high rating, a player will necessarily have all these pieces of knowledge and skill. So given a high enough rating, the chances of winning will be 100%.

Try for one minute to actually consider how good a player must be to get to 2700. We're not talking about ordinary GMs.

Here's a recent win by the weakest 2700+ player at present which was played before he rose to 2700. With an abundance of sensational 1300s running about, it should not be too difficult to find one willing and capable to annotate this game.

Sure I consider it pretty legendary to be able to beat a 1300 player thousands of times in a row. That's a hell of a lot of games.

"So there is a point where just one more piece of knowledge or skill covers the last chance a lower rated player has to even get chances against you."

It just seems implausible. And rather artificial. To just say ok, now you just can't beat me. No, it's just another thing to decrease the 1300s chances, and the rating system would agree, a 2700 has a higher chance of beating a 1300 than a 2600, it does recognize that 2700s are better than 2600s. Some rare sticky situations the 2600 gets into are more likely to be avoided by the 2700 due to their insight. But they remain human.

It's not even that there is something inherently impossible about there being some point where the chances get to 100%... it's just that, well, I need some sort of basis before I suppose that :) It seems much more reasonable to think that the odds of a 1300 winning simply go down, in comparison to 2600s, 2500s, etc, rather than that there is some magic impossible force where the gods don't allow the 2700 to blunder a piece even over the course of thousands of games :) Unless "Oh 2700s are really good y'know" counts as a basis.

"What it boils down to is as long as the 2700 player has the will to focus, he will win. Only if the torture is so great that they lose the will to play decent moves will they lose... and that's not a real game anyway."

He will win, over 99.99% of the time. Look, I'll tell a story. I recently blundered a double checkmate against a kid about 150 points lower rated than me. What's interesting about it? My mind actually felt really good during that game. I was seeing everything. I built up a winning position where my opponent had to try a desperate piece sac for a few pawns but insufficient compensation. My opponent lined up his rook and bishop with my king, threatening a discovery. So I looked at lots of ways I could block the discovered check, looked at what the rook could try to do, and found all the problems with it.

Unfortunately, I just didn't consider that he could try double discovered check, rather than just a discovered check -- perhaps because most of his discoveries hit my queen, so I focused more on those ones. And that was mate in 1 for him unfortunately. My mind was working quite well, but sometimes strange situations where everything I see happens to not be this one double check, are still possible, unlikely, but possible, and this possibility gave me a disappointing loss. I can not at all say I had any sort of energy problem -- I was feeling better than usual in fact. Nor can I say my opponent played higher than his strength -- I had control of the game. I probably saw more things than he did. But of course he saw what counts.

The rating system is an estimate based on incomplete information.

I'm saying in reality, if we knew everything, we could see there are units of information that let you play correctly in specific situations. If you have enough units, you play correctly in all the situations a 1300 can generate.

This is not possible if the 1300 plays randomly, because you can't cover all positions. However it's also my contention that a human can't play randomly.

"The rating system is an estimate based on incomplete information."

"I'm saying in reality, if we knew everything, we could see there are units of information that let you play correctly in specific situations. If you have enough units, you play correctly in all the situations a 1300 can generate."

And this seems to just be a baseless assumption. It's not unreasonable to say that what we consider covering all the units is really just our inability to understand what thousands of games is really like, and the kinds of odd things that can happen with so many. I can't really grasp it either, but I don't pretend I can. You can't just dismiss that just because we casually observe that 2700s make very few unforced errors. How many games do we look at to base our decision? Maybe dozens? That's not close to enough. When we see hundreds of quality moves we get absorbed in that. But we're not talking hundreds of moves. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of moves. The 1300 only needs a tiny percentage of opportunities to win a tiny percentage of the time.

I haven't been saying 2700 vs 1300 here actually, I'm just saying theoretically why it makes sense a player can have an expected score of 100% even if the rating system will always give some very small decimal just above zero.

As for "unforced errors" I think we need more specific terminology. When a 1300 makes an error it means they lost a rook. When a 2000 player makes an error they lost a tempo. When a 2700 player makes an error...

And also "unforced." Carlsen plays 20 "best" moves in a row and even if the position is equal his opponent can be pressured into a mistake. Is that unforced? Would Nakamura make the same "unforced" error against a 1300?

Ok, so I understand there is a random nature to chess. No one can see to the end, so (other than just uncharacteristic blunders) we can get into positions whose evaluation we didn't expect.

Still, it's not so random that this evaluation is off by an enormous amount. If you want to say a 1300 has a non-zero chance, ok, I can't prove it either way. But I think you can argue a basis for there being a 100% chance in some cases.

That's why I make the distinction "unforced" in the first place. In your Carlsen example, the opponent would be making a "forced" error because they were under pressure.

"I haven't been saying 2700 vs 1300 here actually, I'm just saying theoretically why it makes sense a player can have an expected score of 100% even if the rating system will always give some very small decimal just above zero."

I don't really disagree here. My problem is not that the expected score being 100% simply can't be, but that people don't really give a good reason for this to be believed. It could be true, but why should I think so? What I believe doesn't require as much dreaming. I'm just saying 2700s make fewer mistakes, so there are fewer chances to lose, it's the same thing that makes you go up to any higher rating. I'm better off going by the rating system than making up my own theory that I just pulled right out of my ass.

"we can get into positions whose evaluation we didn't expect."

Right. It's not just random blunders. The above point is a much more realistic scenario. Still super unlikely, but nevertheless. Maybe one game in a thousand between the 2700 and 1300 will feature some closed up position where the 1300 doesn't have to play great moves to hold together. Even here the 1300 is extremely likely to lose, but it's probably not a negligible chance that they would draw or win (maybe the 2700 overpresses, maybe the 1300 is feeling inspired and finds better ideas). Remember that at the end of the day the 1300 and 2700 are both human, even if they're in good form.