We study contests where, subject only to a capacity constraint on mean performance, contestants compete for one of several identical prizes by choosing random performance levels. The rank-dependent reward feature of these contests gives capacity-constrained contestants win-small/lose-big preferences. These preferences lead to equilibrium strategies which are generally skewed and never risk maximizing. In the case of symmetric capacity, we derive closed-form solutions and analyze the effects of contest structure on equilibrium behavior. When contestants’ capacities are private information, contests serve as a selection mechanism. We show that, contrary to the risk-taking-and-ruin intuition, weaker contestants do not always gamble on high-risk strategies and that, when the capacities of weak and strong contestants are sufficiently different, the contest mechanism produces perfect selection efficiency. Finally, we examine the effects of various contest modifications and apply our results to mutual fund tournaments, R&D contests, and stochastic contests.