Leechers of chess.com

The idea that playing higher rated opponents will boost your rating is false. It isn't complicated. The rating system does actually work.

If what you say contradicts the math, I'm not buying it, sorry. If you want to know why the rating system can't be gamed that way, I can give you links. Let me know.

I used to have my reading range set from -100 to +100 but I literally never got an opponent higher rated than myself. So I switched mine to -50 to +100 and now I get opponents rated right around where I am. 

I wish I had enough free time that I could spend some getting myself all worked up over something as ridiculous as this. Set the rating range for who you want to play and let everybody else do whatever they want to do. Life is too short for this stuff.

Yes, life is too short. Life is too short to continuously beat class B players who abuse chess.com's settings. But you're from Pennsylvania, what else should I expect? 

My first question would be, why do you care what I do? What does it have to do with you?

My next question would be, are you not intelligent enough to go in the options and set the rating range to the people you want to play? If you want it to be +0 and -0, have at it. Idgas what you do. There's millions of players, go play one.

@41, 

I just don't get worked up over any of this stuff. Hikaru and Danya have been used as examples and I just don't see the reason for anybody to be concerned. In the case of Hikaru I don't really find his stuff educational and rarely watch. I did watch his Botez Gambit speedrun and enjoyed that. But as a general rule I don't watch any of his stuff. Daniel on the other hand has fantastic educational stuff and the information he gives in his speed run videos is like grease, it just rubs off on you. Often times he is playing his own subscribers, some of his speed runs were more often than not his own subscribers. Sometimes they were even stream sniping and would be in the chat during the game.

John Bartholomew originated the idea when he did his climbing the rating ladder videos, with the only difference that he didn't set up a new account, he simply played with his existing one. So a 800 player had to pick him out of the pool on ICC which they obviously knew what they were getting into because they had to choose on the map of players. Again those videos were fantastic and at the time were unprecedented educational material. And he also took the risk of losing massive points with no chance for gaining any. Didn't complain one bit and there were hundreds of those videos of 15 minute games.

Daniel has had several players in his that he knows personally. The guy who wrote the book Mayhem in the Mora played him in his speedrun. They in fact did a call after the game and analyzed the game together after the video. Daniel grabbed the book off the shelf when the game was over so he could refer back to it and he did that multiple times in other games against other players where he would check to see if the moves that had been played were Theory from the book or not.

 This just doesn't sound like people who are going to be upset about having played against a gm. 

I believe my seek range is currently set to -100 / +100. The goal is to always play someone around my playing strength, without making it too restrictive.

I tried -25/+25 for a while, but when it's too narrow, it can increase the wait time for a pairing (depending on the time of day or night).

The psychology of why players choose different seek ranges can change, depending on the person.

If playing opponents who are too high or too low frustrates you, try -100/+100. It's a nice, comfortable range.

Chances are, these players would also have their own settings as -25 and +400, so their paired opponents should not be more than 50 rating points below their own.

For regular games, it's probably good to have opponent's ratings not too far off our own ratings. But in tournaments, this might be hard to enforce.

if everyone sets their rating to -50 +inf, we will all get paired with players within 50 rating points of our rating. I fail to see how large of a catastrophe that would be.

Anyways my seeks are -200 +inf, not because I want to, but because I have to, in order to play rapid.

If everyone sets their seeks to -50 +inf... Then we will all get paired with people within 50 rating points. This is the worst case scenario, according to OP: everyone tries to leech off the system.

Well, in the end... the result does not seem to be that dramatic, does it?

What?

They won't always... what? 

And what does lichess have to do with anything? Why would it be different on lichess and how does that relate to the OP?

And it's queue.

Sorry, but I still think it's all very simple and obvious. The rating system is not affected by games between unmatched opponents. And sorry, no, you can't play 100% zero risk games. If they let an 800 player in a tournament where everyone else is 1600, groovy, but even then, what's gained on the weekend (816, oh happy day) will quickly be lost during the week, ratings aside. If you play higher rated players you'll get more points but fewer wins, lower rated, less points but more wins. It doesn't just balance out. It balances out EXACTLY. It's a sophisticated formula and it works.

You're kidding yourself if you think you'll boost your rating by only playing higher rated opponents. If you just LIKE to play them, for the challenge, I get that, but don't be weird about it. 

I'll play anyone, even YOU.

This topic:

Another in the long list of things that don't matter but some random person gets unreasonably upset about.

This is another obvious falsehood. You're not understanding how the rating system works. It doesn't matter where you start. Play enough games and your rating will be correct. If you start too high, you'll lose points. If you start too low, you'll gain points. Period. 

I said "this topic" so I was talking about the OP.

oh... sorry

It does help a bit. Natural fluctuations in performance have the biggest impact when the ratings are close.

As a simple example, imagine I'm playing badly against someone rated much higher and I lose... in this case my downward fluctuation didn't hurt me since I would have normally lost. Against a much lower rated player it's the opposite i.e. when I'm in really good form and playing well it doesn't matter since I would normally win anyway.

Yes the rating system is robust so on paper it doesn't matter who you play against, and yes it's a bit silly to say "watch me lose against high rated players, that's how I'll increase my rating" but in practice playing exclusively higher rated players will help boost your rating a bit and I think it's because this is the condition that rewards you the most when you're playing your best, and punishes you the least when you're playing poorly.