I think motivated Scholastic players benefit from playing up if they are halfway into their current section. When they are confident at their level it's good to get a taste of what is coming next.
My experience is that as an adult the occasional game vs a master is very good to keep one focused on what level you need your game to be at. Realistically though, IM Pruess is right when he said beating players of your own strength consistently is the main priority.
If you're willing to focus and work hard in every game, and then commit to really analysing your games afterward (say, at least a few weeks per game without any outside help) then it may be worth it once a year or so. Otherwise, you're wasting your and your opponent's time IMO.
For a scholastic player, it's fine, their brains are plastic and absorb faster than they can even realize they're playing better. Losing also helps motivate to study between tournaments (it does for me anyway).
I don't have live chess tourney experience. What I have found on chess.com's echess is that once I play someone that is over 200 rating points higher than me - I get smoked so badly it's not doing me or them any good.
If I am playing ten games simultaneously, I'd like to have a distribution like this:
-100 -100 -50 -50 even even +50 +50 +100 +100
That way you are getting a good mix of winning when you should win and playing better players, but still beatable opponents. I don't mind getting better slowly, though. If I were a scholastic whiz I would probably be in a bigger hurry.
Nice - I like to try out new openings on both lower, equally and higher rated opponents to see how they fare.
The question posed to the panel of two (Danny and David) was whether or not it is beneficial to "play up" a section in rating class (we are talking otb tournaments here) or whether or not a player always benefits more from playing against players of the same level.
You can check out what our opinions were in the "On Demand" section of our broadcast in Chess/TV today -- and you can let us know your opinions here!!!