Why are 800-1000 players here five times harder to beat than 1200-1400?

I played for over three years on chessdotcom and came to the same conclusions as the OP. There is something 'not-quite-right' about the eco system when considering lower-level games - you play higher rated opponents and you see consistency, play lower level opponents and there is no consistency with regard to playing strengths, you could get completely stumped in ways that seldom occurred against higher level players. All this acts as a strong drag on lower-level players ECO ratings such that no progress is made. The main counter argument is 'well that is how the eco system is supposed to work' but eventually I came to the conclusion there was something wrong somewhere.

Never worked out why this would be - although there are plenty of possibilities* - or whether I was deluded, however I no longer play people on chessdotcom. I have not noticed the same 'effect' on LiChess although I play much less on-line nowadays preferring the playing consistency of old dedicated chess computers and Bots.

* My best guess - and only a guess - was that the 300K+ people banned each month on chessdotcom were pretty much the same people month after month, there is no way chessdotcom could detect this for non-subscribed customers. If so, this would leave the lower level gameplay pretty corrupted. Additionally there was nothing to stop stronger players running multiple freebee accounts with much lower eco ratings than the fixed LiChess 1500. Let's face it, everyone likes to win at chess, even when such 'wins' are fairly pointless. The ECO system was never designed to cater for such possibilities or human behaviours.

Note, it's much more difficult for higher rated players to appreciate this, the only time such players would meet sub-1000 mini-Magus players is in tournaments, when the most likely reaction and explanation would be to suspect 'cheating'.

Because they don't want to give up, and they want to get their score up.

The simplest explanation is that the style of play is different / wild and I'm screwing up defenses to threats, etc. As I go back and analyze, there are a lot of games that I'm losing to not seeing threats that higher rated players would not make, or messing up the defenses which are sometimes tricky.

It would be great if there was a resource like "we took the lichess opening database explorer and computed every position that looks like an unsound threat that many players lost to and here are the top 50" or whatever. I will probably do something very much like this if it doesn't exist because it's making me insane.

On CC I definitely faced cheaters (when it smelled bad usually the account closed shortly after). They felt like playing computers. That's not what these feel like. Here it feels like a lot of lower rated players know a lot of weird opening sidelines / traps that have maximum aggression, and somehow play them /exceedingly fast/ and very well, at least in blitz controls. So, I blunder, and it's almost always punished.... with a computer I will literally never gain the advantage in post-analysis, this is "you had the advantage but you had to do it just right and/or see many different sharp counterplay threats".

IDK maybe it's just me and "it's subjective" or w/e after all. I played a 1760 in an blitz arena and it felt sane / normal / had time, there were a single set of ideas I was playing and a set of ideas he was playing, and I nearly won. (Missed a pin that cost me an otherwise very won game.) I play 900s and I tilt out because it's 5 minutes and it feels like every move is a defense check with a different crazy attack with subtleties I have to re-calculate everything over for super-fast or time crunch, and I eventually lose one and they pounce... how do you even train for that?

A lot of lower rated players do seem to play wild attacking lines or just plain unusual lines, and if you aren't paying attention you can get in trouble in a hurry. As I mentioned earlier, I really think part of it is the natural tendency to relax/let down one's guard when playing a lower-rated opponent. Do you have a few games you can point to as examples?

@Rogue_Zamboni said in #9:
> Uh, those aren't the ranges I gave, and the averaging makes your "statistics" totally invalid, (esp. because I noticed this effect /on a downslide/).

Ok. I have corrected the ranges.
You have 9 wins out of 21 games in the range of 800-1000 average rating of both players. Your win rate in the 800-1000 range is 42.8%.
You have 17 wins out of 57 games in the range of 1000-1200 average rating of both players. Your win rate in the 1000-1200 range is 29.8%.
You have 14 victories in 43 games in the 1200-1400 range. Your win rate in the 1200-1400 range is 32.5%.

@deityrox - It's still not helpful. Even if it were correct it would not be helpful. (Re-read what I wrote to see why it is not correct.)

@Rogue_Zamboni said in #1:
> They seem to all know every opening line, play ridiculous risky things and get away with it, punish every little mistake, and play so fast that your clock is always run down. It's not just subjective - my win % is way higher at higher levels. The games feel different at the lower bracket - brutal and hopeless, even when I've got a winning advantage, it's impossible to convert. What's going on here?
>
> I don't understand why they don't advance and have higher elo....

Well thats because you don't know how to punish the blunders they make. Chess is a game of competition. A game of logic. When you play chess, let the game strip all emotion from you. Right now its about defending your king, winning against the enemy. It takes determination and dedication. The reason why those players don't advance is because they don't truly have what it takes to advance. Study chess endgames. Put your time into it. Apply the puzzles to your gameplay. If those 800-1000's are brutal and reckless. Then brute strength is all they have. What makes them advance is when they apply tactics to their gameplay.

@Rogue_Zamboni said in #16:
> @deityrox - It's still not helpful. Even if it were correct it would not be helpful. (Re-read what I wrote to see why it is not correct.)
My statistics for all game modes and variants.
51 wins out of 91 in the 800-1200 range. Win rate 56%.
50 wins out of 82 in the 1200-1300 range. Win rate 61%.
109 wins out of 222 in the 1300-1400 range. Win rate 49%.
35 wins out of 85 in the 1400-1500 range. Win rate 41.2%.
11 wins out of 68 in the 1500-1700 range. Win rate 16.2%.
3 wins out of 10 in the 1700-2900 range. Winrate 30%.

Should I write about my impressions of my games and assumptions about the strength of opponents when their rating is already visible? Maybe if you play a thousand games, then everything will become clear by itself? Or solve a thousand puzzles (as I do).

@Rogue_Zamboni said in #13:
... I play 900s and I tilt out because it's 5 minutes and it feels like every move is a defense check with a different crazy attack with subtleties I have to re-calculate everything over for super-fast or time crunch, and I eventually lose one and they pounce... how do you even train for that?

Genuine low level players can't play like this.

The way I think of it is like this; a chess position will have a certain complexity, the higher the level of complexity the more disadvantaged the lower level player will be. The only time a much lower-rate player can stand a chance of beating a much higher rated player, is if the latter player fails to create positions of sufficient complexity to exploit their superiority. That's what probably happened in your 1700 game. If you're a high rated player you always have to create highly complex positions to maintain the high rating.

@borninthesixties - Here is an example where I get smoked by a low-level player making near-instant moves in a crazy line. I make one mistake (yes I moved a piece twice or whatever, but it's a game losing blunder, not a lost tempo, and it takes more than 5:00 of analysis for me to see why.) OTOH, he has an acpl of /10/ and clearly knows the line all the way out to all 12 moves and beyond (if I had defended correctly).

I literally never see this kind of play OTB, even from titled players I've played.