I just don't understand. I can beat players rated 1600 and 1700 with both colors but can't beat a player with a rating below 1300 to save my life. Especially troublesome are players who bring out their queen early and never develop or use another piece. What gives?
Yet your best win at this site was someone rated at 1560.
It says your best win was against 1560 so "I can beat players rated 1600 and 1700" sounds a bit like an overstatement.
You beat higher level players in the begining because you are matched with players with ratings, formed by only a few games, so you can imagine they are quite inflated.
I will say that in blitz it's not unusual for me to lose to players ranked 200+ points lower than me.
I think it can be psychological -- when playing someone ranked a lot lower you might put extra pressure on yourself thinking you should certainly win (or maybe even the opposite, where you get overconfident and play quick, bad moves thinking they will be good enough to win).
The opponent might also play as if he's "got nothing to lose" and play some crazy opening that is dangerous if you don't respond correctly.
The higher level ones are in real life but it does make sense that the online games were against players whose rating wasn't indicative of real performance. Maybe I didn't have enough games or they didn't have enough games to have a real pairing of any sort. Over confident is probably a factor too. I used to be USCF 1660 and thought I should be able to beat someone lower. I either lost something in my game or am just too careless.
That is right The best I've ever beaten online is 1560. I don't get games with anyone any higher. Still, I have a ton of unfamiliar trouble with sub 1300. The online rating I have is because these guys wind up trouncing me.
Want to dig this theme.
Well is kinda true. Playing vs low rated players, specially those with 2000k + rapid games often is hard for numerous reasons:
- They are experienced, still really low rated, but at some aspect of the game they understand really well, but are bad at others.
- You dont play at your best expecting easy game.
- Your low rated opponent is playing at his best.
- Your opponent is playing bad moves and you have advantage and more material but is far from over - thats exacly where we all blunder. We spot some cheap tricks and becouse early he played bad we think for fun to make some cheap tricks which often have deadly effect and opportunety for tactics for your opponent.
- We start to play bad moves, becouse we think we are in control.
- low rated opponents might use help at some point.
- We often trade everything and go for endgame where most low rated opoonents have no idea what to do, but often thats not the case.
- Some players are sandbagging. They have 1500 rapid rating but 900 blitz rating. Thats 600 points difference. Clearly something is fishy.
- They guy is just underrated and improved a lot in past couple months or so, but havent played much since then.
The higher level ones are in real life but it does make sense that the online games were against players whose rating wasn't indicative of real performance. Maybe I didn't have enough games or they didn't have enough games to have a real pairing of any sort. Over confident is probably a factor too. I used to be USCF 1660 and thought I should be able to beat someone lower. I either lost something in my game or am just too careless.
That is right The best I've ever beaten online is 1560. I don't get games with anyone any higher. Still, I have a ton of unfamiliar trouble with sub 1300. The online rating I have is because these guys wind up trouncing me.
I have heard this story a couple of times before, an intermediate player who only played OTB club chess against other intermediate players that play normal way, following chess principles makes an account online where he has to face players who play completely dubious openings and in general play chess in a bad way, only playing with their queen and pawns, not developing their pieces etc. When an OTB intermediate player is faced with this dubious play online sometimes he doesn't know how to play against it because he doesn't have the experience. On the other hand, us, players who got better online, have a lot of experience when playing these dubious styles of lower rated players online and we easily beat them, we even like when our opponents play dubiously because then we can win more easily than if our opponents played normally.
A lot of time when someone says things like this, it is a matter of small sample size, but in his case, he played a lot of games on the site, in cases like his, I think explanation in my first comment is correct.
I just don't understand. I can beat players rated 1600 and 1700 with both colors but can't beat a player with a rating below 1300 to save my life. Especially troublesome are players who bring out their queen early and never develop or use another piece. What gives?