Losing against weak opponents vs. winning against stronger opponents

The title of this thread is a bit of a long one so I'll repeat it here just incase of topic name length:

Losing against weak opponents vs. winning against stronger opponents.

Now with the former I'm like: there's no communication between pieces; they make dubious pawn moves; they're whatever tempo behind in the opening; they do not give a rat's a$$ about your plan all they care about is their plan; their only plan is a kingside attack with total disregard for what the board is telling them to do, the list is endless and I'm like, I'm losing against these guys? 

Then comes winning against stronger opponents. Namely, they open up lines towards their castled king because they get greedy for your bishop locked outside a pawn chain; They think they're winning because of an exchange sacrifice (this is proven correct when they want to trade down material); they would prefer a piece to become passive in defense instead of giving up the pawn for activity and again the list is endless, and I'm like this guy's higher rated than me?

Now, I've read posts on here where could something something rated player beat such and such player of this strength. The answer is yes. Players seem to think if they're a few hundred points above their challenge it's an easy win. This isn't true. At the top level yes, at the amatuer level? No.

There appears to be this sense of arrogance when one's rating goes to their head, oh you're such and such what do you know? But until you reach a profound level there is a huge margin where players a class or two below you will beat you and when it's your turn you'll beat an opponent who's a class or two above you.

What the fuck are you talking about

His first point is pointing out the difference between theory and practice. Both his lower and higher rated opponents have shown lack of knowledge and poor fundamentals. His second point is ratings don't predict the outcome, pointing out he has lost to lower rated players and beaten higher rated players. He makes a special case for class players in this regard saying ratings predict professional matches more accurately.

-------

My own rationalization is that ratings are an average. So I may lose to the low rated wild attacker, and continue to find games against him difficult in the future, but if we both played the same 10 opponents, I'm more likely to preform better on average and this is why my rating stays higher.

Also, in the case of one game matches, sometimes people simply play above or below their own standard. I may lose 1 out of 10 games against a weaker player, but in that one game they simply played better than I did. Maybe they happened to strike on the right idea or maybe the nature of the play happened to play toward their strengths, etc.

I agree the distinction between theory and practice is important and particularly true at a class level. Between the poor opening and the clumsy endgame, the class player who is the better analyst will probably pull far ahead in the middlegame.

I tend to disagree about judging higher rated players the way the OP does. It may be true they're breaking principals, but sometimes they do it knowingly because the position is an exception. I once had a lower rated player tell me after I got an advantage I started to drift in the middlegame. IMO my play at that stage was technically very good, methodically eliminating play he apparently didn't realize he had.

...

Wow,

Ok, so the thing is, it is true, that at the ametuer level, a higher level player has an easier time winning than at a lower level. It seems to make sense that a 1700 rated player would basically always win against a 1300 without a lot of trouble. At a higher level, it is much harder as a 2800 to beat a player of 2400 rating. There is much less difference between the 2800 and the 2400, than the difference between a 1700 and a 1300. If you go even further, a 600 would always with no effort at all beat a 200 rated player. Basically, no, there is a larger margin between players, the lower rating it gets.

Is there any other good way to predict matches if there were no ratings? There is a good reason that your rating is not changed hugely if you lose to a much lower rated player. I mean, Caruana would have been down at the lower 2700s, if there were large rating swings based on ratings.

If you lose to a much lower rated player, it is not because they played better than someone at your rating, you probably played a lot worse that someone at your rating.

HEY,WOAH,HEY!TALKIN ABOUT ME,RATED 592?I PLAYED YOU A FEW HOURS AGO

@amilton542 i can assure you that this description of a players is not only for low rated ones. There are many, many club players with rating about 1800 OTB who do this against high rated pllayers and i saw GM's lose to them (veterans/inactive players or whos are bad at blitz) All those pawn pushes, bad bishops and even blunders whole pieces.

Chess is hard game. Even when you are thinking you are a lot better in the current position and you are, is still hard to convert and win, specially when you have less than 5 min.

Best advice is just to forget about rating and play the board/position, not the player and have fun.

houg r kootieful.

I don't think this thread is kosher.

Exactly

The post no.5 of MPS 500 ..His last sentence is the summary of everything in

this thread..

You can t say the F word in here Shrekt.

Yeah, I can relate to the OP. It's not always easy to see how rating differences shape up. A fair amount of games against players 200 points below can involve them playing just as well as you for most of the game, and only at the end giving you chances. And yet somehow, the ratings still tend to accurately predict the result. It can be mysterious. Sometimes a rating difference of even 100 points can be subtle to show, even though it's a pretty significant difference. I don't think we know that much about what makes us win/lose games, even though we like to think that we do.

You're Fargin' right!

Our ratings are not final, anyway. They are provisional until the day we die.

Based on the original question (without the explanation).  Losing against weak opponents vs. winning against strong opponents.  I think the original guy meant Losing against strong vs winning against weak...  Could be the guy needs to get his head on straight.

<Elubas> +1

We don't know what makes us win or lose games - but one can't argue with the results... that much is sure.