False ratings.

I play people casually mostly but i often come up against lower rated players than myself who then play to a much higher level.
I'm talking 1150 ratings who play more like 1600- 1700's.
Annoying to say the least..
Can nothing at all be done about the number of folks playing on false ratings?.

Don't be too fast to judge rating based on performance in a single game.. also at 1200 online it's easy to accidentally perform like a 1600/1700 (by not making tactical mistakes, exploiting tactic) but rating is based on performance over a bunch of games

I take every casual game with a grain of salt. The people who play casual are not interested in keeping their rating accurate, so I don't take those ratings very seriously.

Also, at my (our?) mediocre level, I can best categorize my performance by the number of blunders I do. Occasionally, the game has zero, and I look pretty smart. But that's just happenstance.

One of the reasons lower rated players are lower rated is usually the lack of consistency. And the lower you go, the more random the performance is. Not only between games but even within one game. Just yesterday I played a nice game against ~300 points higher rated opponent and managed to get it into a promising endgame with a pawn up. And then I missed a trivial fork and blundered an exchange. An hour and half of hard work went down the toilet in 19 seconds.

@mkubecek said in #4:
> One of the reasons lower rated players are lower rated is usually the lack of consistency. And the lower you go, the more random the performance is. Not only between games but even within one game. Just yesterday I played a nice game against ~300 points higher rated opponent and managed to get it into a promising endgame with a pawn up. And then I missed a trivial fork and blundered an exchange. An hour and half of hard work went down the toilet in 19 seconds.

I'm very familiar with that scenario!

Unfortunately nothing can be done except blocking but that too only 500. After that just suffer.

@JockThamson said in #1:
> I play people casually mostly but i often come up against lower rated players than myself who then play to a much higher level.

The easy way is to play rated, and the chance to get matching opponents increases a lot.

Why would you expect that players that p,ay unrated are rated correctly? For me, playing unrated only comes with downsides.

But even then, performance can be streaky. Speaking for myself, I bad a blitz rating of 2000, but it went straight sown to 190p by playing badly for a couple of days. It can easily go up again. When having those consistent streaks, the difference in performance rating would be quite large. Note that you cannot accurately measure playong strength from one (or even a couple) of games.

I do play rated games but i play casually often while learning new openings and strategies but aye we all have good and bad spells.

@JockThamson said in #1:
> I play people casually mostly but i often come up against lower rated players than myself who then play to a much higher level.
> I'm talking 1150 ratings who play more like 1600- 1700's.
> Annoying to say the least..
> Can nothing at all be done about the number of folks playing on false ratings?.

No as me for example have a higher win rate against higher elo, so that is completely fair and also the points rated by latest stockfish.

There is also a lobby for your rating btw...

It’s just your pov,