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

"Could I beat them? Well Phelps might drown, Wiggins might crash, and Farrar might be tripped and stay down!"

I get your point, but this can lead to a no true scotsman fallacy. Haven't you seen 400-500 rating point upsets before? Did they have a heart attack every time it happened? Or were they just normal people, who happened to have a bad game? That can happen. You don't have to be mentally insane to have a terrible performance.

In other words, variance is a normal thing :) Humans are supposed to vary :)

Yeah but I don't disagree with 95% of what modest is saying mdinnerspace! If you think I'm disagreeing with him you're misunderstanding. Things that are theoretically possible, can be so unlikely that they're depressing. I don't doubt that modest got crushed by that really strong player. His chances to win were greater than zero, but were still very bleak indeed, and almost might as well not be there.

Really? Do you have the game? That would be fun to see.

the idea being promoted is dangerous and possibly predatory... 

About the true strenght of a lowrated player. In one game he walks into an openingtrap he didnt know. In another game he doesnt. Lowrated usually know less about openings and patterns and have to rely more on their calculating -skills and positional intuition. Those things might be excellent. Lowrated players has a very dynamic true strenght. Blunders, but not in all games. For myself I guess the strenght is swinging between 1000 and 2000 fide. I dont think the masters have so much dynamic, I think they have stabilized.

I do computeranalyze many games. The most presice ones has less than 10% moves inaccurate, and an online I won yesterday was ca 40% inaccurate. I guess this is normal for lowrated players.

The  40% inaccurate game was presice enough to win against a 100 higherrated, because he got to agressive and sacrified without 100% winningchances.  https://www.chess.com/echess/game?id=143864980

I think higherrated excpect to win against lowrated and therefore may attack with higher risk than they would against their equals. The lowrated can sitt calm, defend , and punish.

"About the true strenght of a lowrated player. In one game he walks into an openingtrap he didnt know. In another game he doesnt. Lowrated usually know less about openings and patterns and have to rely more on their calculating -skills and positional intuition."

Yeah, that's a good observation. A low rated player will fall into more traps than a higher rated one, which will cost him some games and points, but on the other hand, if he can avoid those traps, the game might be a lot closer.

That's part of being a better player, right? For example opening knowledge. You want to know certain important traps. Not because your opponent will fall into them every time, but just in case. Sometimes you snag a few easy wins because of it. But that's part of the game. You have to be prepared for anything. Sometimes you'll win on traps, other times you'll win by outplaying your opponent.

Every trap you learn might increase your win percentage by one percent or something. So sometimes it's a numbers game. But as it ties in to this discussion, clearly opening traps can have a large influence on the game without either player having to be horribly sick or something :)

In Sandefjord last autumn I did win over two lowrated very young kids, trapping them in some kind of Max Lange-style. The little 7 year old girl , Lykke Merlot Helliesen, has outrated me after that. They could have beaten me if they hadnt walked into the trap. I think they have more talent and calculationskills than me.

One thing lowrated usually have in common is a lower number of fiderated games than the higher rated has. Of course the experience makes a difference.

(The most known merit of Lykke so far is a victory over GM Simen Agdestein in a simultan when she was 6 years old. Simen is no pullover. At his peak he was nr 16 in the world, and he is still 2600+ and active.)

Some traps require non-intuitive moves to avoid them though... lets say something like an unforced Kf1... certain ratings will never consider these moves, even after huge numbers of games they will never be played.

If the 1300 is trying their best to win, I think it really limits their possibilities.

Perpetual motion is motion of bodies that continues indefinitely. This is impossible because of friction and other energy-dissipating processes. A perpetual motion machine is a hypothetical machine that can do work indefinitely without an energy source. This kind of machine is impossible, as it would violate the first or second law of thermodynamics.

Question: Is it possible to one day invent such a machine?

Are the chanches >0 ?

Things that are thought to be impossible due to contradiction of ground rules are impossible... for example a square circle. It's just nonsense.

So it sort of depends on how we define the perpetual motion machine. If it claims to produce energy from nothing, that's nonsense... but a sufficiently advanced machine could appear to do this. I don't mean some idiot in their garage, I mean imaginary technology in the far future.

Universe itself is a perpetual motion machine, isn't it? Also, does Sun count as "close" to a perpetual motion machine? Sun will be there for a very very long time.

Came out of retirement after 4 years to say this! hehe

Been reading your very large topic all this time?

It will take less all that hydrogen to be burned.

RetiFan! Well, I'll be dog gone. We all thought the chanches of your return to be 0 !! The thread has kinda evolved into "anything is possible" with two opposing views. Seems your arrival has swung the pendulum to "yes" !!

And yes, the sun is "close" to a perpetual machine. But does not qualify because alas, one day it will burn out.

No, but i will probably be seeing their coach in Reno this October.  If he is there i will ask him.

I wonder if the 800 rated player will be rated 1500 after a few tournaments... I knew a kid like this who had an absurdly low rating because his first tournament was USCF, and his next 20 tournaments were unrated scholastic tournaments. So 4 years later he plays USCF event #2 and is 1000 points underrated.

Where is he now? Burned out or still playing?

Still playing, he's in his mid 20s by now I think... but went from maybe a 600 rating to 1600 in under a year (because he was underrated). He's about 2100  last time I saw him, where he's been for a number of years now.