Rating limits disfunctional. Getting paired severely out of bounds

Please have a look at my past 2 aborted games. I asked for a 3+2 game against -0 +500 and I got paired against a 1300! (Less than -500) This has been happening on and off since yesterday. And tbh isn't the first time I've seen this either. It's very frustrating. And the funny part is that sometimes I've let it be and played along with the much lower rated players and they inevitably play a very strong game and come close to if not actually beating me. What's going on?

Well, if you are (almost) losing against lower-rated players, I guess it probably either means you are overrated or you are too arrogant and don't take them seriously enough which leads to you not concentrating fully or playing solidly (e.g. trying unsound tricks and traps because "they are lower-rated, they must fall for this").

Anyway, are you playing on the mobile app or in the browser?

Those are obvious deductions from what I said, yes. But after having played online chess for 6 years (10k+ games on this account) with a pretty good record of reporting cheaters, I can speak with some authority that I am past the stage of wrongly estimating a person's strength based on their rating. I don't imply that the lower rated players were using engine assistance. But they could be smurfing. Or something else that I haven't thought of. But they weren't playing at their rating level.

I am using the android app and I see a similar post here and the replies suggest it's an actual bug.

Not sure what you mean. It says you played one 1600 (and everybody else was right around your rating).

Yes, it seems there is a bug in the Android app related to this. I heard it's being worked on so should hopefully be fixed with the next update. Until then, the Lichess website should also work quite well on phones nowadays.

@proteenx i Think they stopped support for the lichess (not sure) so stop using the app and return to website