How do I challenge people 100+ rating points higher than me?

I'm 1700 blitz rating. Everytime I try to play a game, I always get paired up against people in the 1550-1750 range. I want tougher competition!

How do I set it so that I only challenge people rated 1800+?

In your settings there is an option to select a rating range for challenges I believe eg. between 0-200 rating difference with you and opponent. Not sure if you can set it to only challenge higher rated.

This is precisely the problem. It forces me to play opponents that are 50 rating points below me. There's no option to strictly play better opponents. So how do I go about that?

This is precisely the problem. It forces me to play opponents that are 50 rating points below me. There's no option to strictly play better opponents. So how do I go about that?

PC: Play>Live Chess>Custom Challenge>Range

Mobile: Play>New Game>Create Challenge>Rating Range

There are two boxes to choose the low end and high end ratings up to a 400 point differential at 50 point increments, or simply "infinite"/"open if you don't care about the high or low end.

Look for open challenges.

I don’t believe it’s possible to create seeks where the minimum rating is equal to or above your own rating. 

If you want higher rated players to play you, you should be willing to play lower rated players too. Just my two cents.

Unfortunately it seems like everyone wants to only play with folks rated higher than them, and well, the math obviously doesn't work out....

I'm more than willing to play a game against someone 200 rating points below me in return for another game against someone 200 rating points above me. But I never get that chance.

If I play 100 games with the settings (-400, +400), I'll be lucky to get even 3 of those games against people 100+ rating points above me.

So I change the settings to (-50, +infinity), and I still can't get paired against people 100+ rating points above me.

I understand that there's a bell curve and that people who are above average are naturally going to be more likely to play against people closer to the mean (ie. lower rated players), but I don't know why it happens so often to the point where I don't even get a single game against 1800+ players. Like do they all set their controls to (-50, +infinity) like I do?

This is really annoying. I wish there was an option for diamond members like us to choose whatever rating controls we want. Like I pay for this service, so there should be some benefits.

I remember it used to be possible, but it no longer is sadly

Tournaments might be an idea. The better you play the stronger the opposition...

Yea it's pretty annoying because if you blunder against a worse player, You are stuck playing people below you for the next 5 games. It really kills my motivation to play. 

But you can set parameter level opponent mini -25 or -50

If you blunder against a worse player perhaps it is you in fact who is the worse player... 

Lol, two years later. Dude is 2000 now.

plus everything is free on L*chess

about Lichess...

Lichess does have superior code, but I would rather play on a site with slightly worse code (still really good) and neutral good service instead of a site that pushes the ideology of it's founder (for example LC hosted a "BLM"-tournament to support that ideology). Also the staff of LC behaves like an inner circle and they do not try to give a good neutral service. In my opinion LC is confused about their purpose, they want to be better than chess.com and they want to run it like their personal project, so the driving force is largely ego-based there. I would much rather be a customer on a site that is not confused about it's purpose, chess.com is a business that also offers free stuff, it gives neutral customer service and does not push any ideology (I hope I'm right here, haven't seen any so far) apart from chess and that's the way it should be, for me at least. 

Yeah it kind of sucks ... especially with all the cheaters using computers in the low ratings.  I have to claw my way to 1000 in 3 min blitz but I've clobbered 1600 rated players in 10 min.  I could get to 1600 if the cheaters weren't bringing back down over and over again.  Winning 7 points at a time really isn't cutting it.  Almost wanna quit this site if they can't get rid of the cheaters.