You´re right
Dont focus on your opponents rating too much!
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I agree !! Don't play with your opponent, play with the position on the chessboard (Helped me a lot).
Also, attacking play is mostly better than defensive one 
I've won opponents 200 points higher, just becasue I played with sacrifices (e.g. I sometimes Give a Knight for 2 pawns in the sicilian) and I played dynamic moves 
hi folks,
thanks for the affirmation!
@apostolis1: thats a very good formula for chess ("dont play your opponent, play the position"). sums up all i want to point out here. and i know what you mean with your sacrifice option (i play the sicilian myself, with black and white, and with white i always check if there is an opportunity to play N/Bxb5, and with black i try to prevent that!). i think here you touch one really important point concerning the play against stronger opponents: stronger opponents are probably stronger in every aspect of the game. but your best chance in that case is to test their strength in the tactical area. i think stronger players are more likely to miss something tactical than they are to miss something strategical. so it is normally a good idea to reach imbalanced and unclear positions. against stronger players you will lose those more often than not; but in a game completely around strategy you will lose almost all your games.
@estragon: yep, I completely agree! especially that notion that stronger players can get away with weak moves because we believe them ("If he plays it it must be good") is a very useful correction, i think. adopting that position hinders us to check the details, and so we will never be able to win against a stronger opponent. they make mistakes, like all humans, only not so many as weaker players do. but in order to punish a mistake you first have to detect it.
A nice article-something I've regretted too. Sometimes I have to remember that if I'm going to play my absolute best against a higher rated player, maybe the lower-rated player is doing the same thing against me!
BTW: In your game, I wasn't sure White's 27. f4 was a blunder. After ...Rxg2, then Qxg2 instead and I think White still has a major initiative because he will double up rooks on the g-file.
@trackdad: yep, exactly the point! i often have the feeling that lower rated opponents give all they have against me. everybody should do that!
here is the computers variation on that ...f4-move: 27... Rxg2 28. Nxg2 Qxh3+ 29. Kg1 Qxh5 30. Qd3 Ba6 31. fxe5 fxe5 32. Rb2 f5 33. exf5 Ng4 34. f6+ Kh8 35. Qg3 Nxf6 36. Qh2
ending with an advantage for black. do you really mean 28. Qg2? but simply ...Rg2 winning the queen?!
Yes, 27...Rxg2; 28. Qxg2, Rxg2; 29. Kxg2 with two rooks for the queen. Originally, I thought this was better than 28. Nxg2, but I had Fritz look at the position. It preferred 28. Nxg2, so I played against it using 28. Qxg2 and found that the black queen does much damage by playing 29...Qa4 and White can't seem to get the rooks coordinated quickly enough.
@trackdad: yep, interesting, that disaster comes to white on the other side of the board now :-) the advantage of the queen - if in a central position she can explode to the location where she is most devastating. but i doubt that i would have found anything of that without the computer. normally, in a game i would prefer the side with the 2 rooks, in so far your variation is definitely interesting and OTB-play-valid, i think.
The rating system in chess is a great thing - it allows to find opponents of similar playing strength, to build tournaments in relatively limited segments and so forth. But sometimes I think all that staring at the rating can be totally misleading. I see it in myself: if I play an opponent several hundred points weaker than me, I think that I "have to win, and easily"! And if I play somebody a lot higher rated than me I initially think "I will lose anyway". In the first case that often results in overstretching a game, and in the second case in a bad attitude towards the game ("He sees more than I do, so it is not worth it to give everything I have into every move").
Here is an example of one of my games of the first category...
So what is to learn here? I think we should consider our opponents rating prior to a game, but we shouldnt depend too much on what that rating stands for. As the above game shows a player with a rating of under 1600 can surprise you completely, so it is not a good idea to underestimate someone just because his rating is a lot lower than your own. The rating can give an overall idea of what you most probably can expect in a game, but nothing more. Dont play a rating, play chess! If the position is equal, then it is equal, no matter who sits on the other side of the board. Dont force too much against weaker players, and dont stop looking for strong moves against higher rated players!