Let’s say you have a 52% win rate on your main. That would be really good! Very few champions have consistent win rates that high. You’d be OP.

And let’s say you need to win five games more than you lose to get to the next tier.

How long would it take you?

How many games should you expect to have to play to climb out of your tier?

Try to guess. Maybe you think around ten to twenty games? Or maybe you are a glass-half-empty kind of person and think it’s like a thousand games, or simply impossible.

The answer can be calculated mathematically. The formula is just:

n / (2p — 1)

where n is the extra number of wins you need, and p is your win rate. See for example here for details.

If you’re at a 52% win rate and need five extra wins, you should expect to play 125 games to climb out. One hundred and twenty-five! That’s a lot of games for an OP champ with such a high win rate.

Here’s a table of the number of games it would take for different levels of your win rate:

WIN RATE | NUMBER OF GAMES NEEDED

51% | 250

52% | 125

53% | 84

54% | 63

55% | 50

56% | 42

57% | 36

58% | 32

59% | 28

60% | 26

Look at that! There are some really interesting takeaways from this chart.

The obvious point is that a small difference in win rate makes a BIG difference in the time it takes to advance tiers. By just improving your win rate from 51% to 52% you save yourself 125 games. Improving from 52% to 55% saves you another 75 games. At ~30 minute matches, this amounts to weeks of playing time you could save by improving your play — thereby improving your team — and moving on up to the next tier.

Put another way, if your win rate was 51% and you dedicated 100 hours to improving your skill such that your win rate increased to 55% — you’d make the next tier faster than if you had just kept queuing up.

You actually save time by focusing on improving, rather than rushing through matches trying to advance.

Second, this explains why the rise and fall of ranked play can seem so dramatic for people. If you just go on a small-sample-size streak, you can move really far up or down. But you might not see a statistically significant change in your win rate until you’ve played dozens or even hundreds of games.

But just because it is hard to see the difference statistically through wins doesn’t mean it is not there. If you are a better player, maybe there are other ways to measure your improvement. Are you farming at an elite level? Are you focusing their carry in late game? Are you warding like the best players in your tier? Are you covering the map enough?

If you could get good metrics like these for your games, you could see your own improvement, even if it would take some time for the statistical results of your win rate to show up. But you will start climbing at your faster speed.