I joined a tourament 14th Chess.com Quick Knock-outs ( 1201-1401 ) and every apponent I got was 1600 and over. How am I expected to win against such opposition ???

lol...perform well i suppose

That sucks eggs :/

Well, when I play opponents who are significantly higher rated than me (or roughly equal to be honest, because I think my "on-line" rating is pretty inflated due to some odd luck of plus 2000 players timing out against me) I look at it as a chance to learn something.  It might not be reasonable to expect to score highly against a whole set of higher rated opponents, but then again it definately happens a lot.  I'm in too many tournaments right now, and as I've progressed through rounds it never happens that the highest rated players in a bracket all advance.  In some cases I was the one to break the expectation by winning.  In some cases soon it will be that I lost to people who were lower rated than me-- they out played me, understood the opening or positon better, and they won't be lower rated than me for long.

Just play good chess, the rest will take care of itself.

But you see you join a tournament with a rating range so that you can play against people in that bracket. You don't expect the tournament to start with players some 200 points over you ...

Yes we all know that we learn by playing people over our rating but geez not everyone is interested in "playing higher players to learn something"

Some people actually think about joining tourneys FOR FUN ...

Fun?  I'm sorry, but I put that through google translate all sorts of ways and still can't make heads nor tails of it.  It must be like a cultural thing. 

I always forget about fun.

Either that or a male/female thing

Oh .... that kind of fun.  Wait, I thought we wer talking about chess. 

Strange LOL so did I

All this fun about fun is good clean fun, but this guy does have a valid point: If you're playing in a tournament restricted to ratings between 1201 and 1401, why should you find yourself paired against a lot of 1600+ players? Do the rules of arithmetic work differently here?

One thing to note about that tournament is that it is now in Round 2 (Round 1 started back in October).  The people you're playing now that are over 1400 are rated that high because they've won games since the tournament started 2 months ago.  Do you think they should be removed because they won their games?

These "official" tournaments automatically remove people that are not in range just before the tournament begins, but they don't do it every round, nor should they.

That isn't to say that in some "non-official" (i.e. member-created) tournaments that people outside the range make it in (usually because their rating changes between registering for the tournament and when the tournament starts), but that is up to the individual TDs to enforce.

Your answer makes complete sense. Of course the winners of the first round are the people most likely to have increased their ratings since the tournament started.

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