Is that title click baity enough? I am not sure; it is my first time. Maybe I should have made it a Top 10 or more of a cliffhanging question… Oh, whatever, let’s get on with it.

The first thought in your head may be, why the heck would I listen to a Silver IV scrub about how to climb? I just watched you feed your ass off on stream the other day. Even if that wasn’t in your head, it is now. To start, I worked with the highest elo players (TSM) for 12+ hours a day for about three months and I observed quite a lot. Temporarily forget the fact that they fired me and think I am useless. The other reason is that I have an extensive background in traditional sports and there is no difference in getting better at baseball as there is at getting better at League of Legends.

Here is the TL;DR tip on how to improve which I will expand upon a bit: hard work, dedication, ability to identify your weaknesses, understand what you need to do to work on the weaknesses, and then do it. If you are the type of person who reads cliff-notes or the Wikipedia page for a book to get the basic points, you can stop now, there really isn’t much more to it. None of the following is groundbreaking, so I don’t want to hear that this article is stupid and common sense. Sometimes you need to be reminded about the importance of common sense. If you want to get a better understanding and some direction, read on.

For those of you still with me, I know you’ve heard the value of hard work. If you haven’t, your parents and teachers suck. The thing is, I guarantee that you don’t do it when it comes to League of Legends. You play the game, blame others, lose, then re-queue another game. There is no thought process. Okay, sure, you occasionally tell yourself, damn, I shouldn’t do that next time, that was my fault, but do you actually construct a way to ensure it doesn’t happen again or a way to stay conscious of that issue? I doubt it. I know I don’t do it. I play the game to have fun and I don’t want to actually put the effort in to climb. I will get incrementally better by just putting in more games, but so do you and everyone else (except that guy stuck in Bronze V with 2000 Urgot games). If that is you also, that is totally fine. Just don’t expect to climb more than a couple of pegs up the elo ladder.

Many think that some people are just better naturally at a game, and that is true to an extent. I don’t think anyone picks League of Legends up with zero experience with it and is automatically a Diamond+ player. I met with each member of TSM at the beginning and asked them to describe their road to the present. Each member told me that when they first played league, they were not great at the game. Their idea of not being good may be different than ours, like Plat level, but they were not Challenger from day one. There is always a learning curve, and the people who don’t stagnate do something to improve. They begin to understand the game better and what they need to do to improve, and then they work hard to fix those things. This is where some people are better naturally than others. If you are high elo and think, what the hell, I don’t do that, I disagree. You do this subconsciously and don’t realize. When you play the game, you naturally begin to understand what you need to fix and can prevent things from happening again without thinking. You have worked on your weaknesses even if you don’t know it. For the rest of us, we don’t do that, at least for League of Legends. We have to work harder, keep ourselves accountable, and devise plans to improve if we want to climb. If you actually want to climb and get better faster than your similar elo counterparts, then you can’t be complacent doing the bare minimum.

Doing more than the bare minimum and what is expected of you is something I preached on a daily basis at TSM. For them, bare minimum meant just showing up to practice, doing only what I asked, giving some input, and putting in the basic amount of effort. That is not good enough. It may be good enough to not be talked to or disciplined, but if they wanted to be the best, they needed to exceed expectations. This is the same for you. You can play solo queue and do the bare minimum. You can pick champs you are good at, try to win, build effectively, and try to remember some trick or guide you read about denying farm or whatever; that won’t be enough to climb out of the hell you’ve been in.

Something else I tried to instill in the TSM player culture was a change in the objective of practice. LCS players are extremely competitive, so even while they know the objective of scrimming is to get better and not win, it is hard to separate the two. League of Legends is still a game that can be won, even if you are practicing, so it is hard not to do everything possible to win and then, as a result, get upset/sad when you lose. The problem with this is that while you are winning in practice, everything is going great and you are improving on your goals. However, when you are working on improving, that usually means working on weaknesses which lead to a higher chance of loss. When you start losing during practice, you can let it consume you and you may lose sight of the real objective, improvement. In short, do your best to see wins as noticeable improvements in what you are working on and not the result of the game. You put in the effort and results will come.

How?

There is no cookie cutter way to improve. Every person will be different and learn differently. If you want a good resource, The Art of Learning, is a great book. /u/pitasso made a great infographic based on the book and how it can relate to League of Legends: http://imgur.com/dzBhosn. There are a lot of learning theories and in depth processes for improvement, however, the main point of this whole article, though, is that you need to do something. As you put in the effort to identify, understand, and execute, you will see what works best for you and you can begin to tailor it. If you want to expand even further, seek out additional professional resources on learning and improvement. Here, I will just give you a good base if you actually want to put in the effort:

Mute Everyone

Just do it. Focus on getting better and not how your teammates feel about you. Remember the goal is improving and after the game that is what success is based on. Not your KDA. Not a win. Success is if you were able to improve on your goal.

Identify Your Weaknesses

Notes

During a game, note your thought process. Don’t worry too much about getting into specifics, you will do that in the next step, and try to note things that you may forget by the time the game is over. Gameplay things like how you died also do not need to be written down. If you were thinking something specifically before you died, you may want to write it down as that is something you may forget 30 minutes+ later. You’ll get better at this after you start to go back after the game and try to remember things and realize the things you forget… those are the things you need to make sure you note in the future.

Replays

Get some sort of replay software, (Play.tv or whatever) and rewatch every single game you play. Good or bad. Don’t worry about other people on your team or even macro play that much. Just watch key points in the game (laning phase, kills, deaths, warding, team fights, chases, etc) and think about what you did and decide what you should have done differently or what you should continue to do. A good way to sort this is to use Excel or Google Sheets and create categories and subcategories for the problems in your play that arise. Now you can sort and count the specific issues and see which ones occur the most frequently. You can even give them importance ratings to help with the next step.

Pick One

Choose one recurring issue to work on. Decide which problem is the most glaring or recurs the most. After taking notes and watching replays, you may notice a plethora of mistakes that you make. Another issue that TSM had at the beginning was attempting to work on all those mistakes at once. They would identify some issues one scrim, go to work on them the next, then identify a new ones at the end of that scrim which they would now want to work on. This lead to inefficiencies and sight would be lost on some of those recurring issues. If you notice new problems, by all means note it, but stay focused on the task at hand. Once you get proficient enough at it, we can move on to the next.

That being said, you can have a couple subgoals if you can manage it. Just don’t jump around with what you are working on, and make sure you can effectively work on the primary goal still. Also, once goals start to be certain situations that may only occur every once in a while, you can begin to add a few situations, just don’t lose track. You can also work on one goal for a bit and switch to a new one once you have made some improvement, but you are getting burned out or it is taking a long time. Just don’t forget to come back to it and keep working on it.

Understand How to Fix Your Weaknesses

This step is going to be really dependent on what weakness you choose to work on. This may be where you go look up if there is any prior literature/guide in /r/summonerschool or another resource. The idea now is to create a game plan on how to tackle your weakness. However you do this, you will want to establish goals for your game that you can measure at the end either with stats or watching the replay. Make sure they are bite size and attainable. You may have a grandiose goal ahead of you, but break it down to manageable subgoals. Meeting those goals or showing improvement toward those goals is the new objective and what you will be either happy or sad about at the end of the game.

Let us pick a couple examples:

Weakness: CSing

You have noticed your CSing is subpar and you have decided this is what you need to work on. You can now make goals for CSing at 10 minutes, 20 minutes, and 30 minutes. Start small and incrementally increase it as you hit your goal. Break it down even further and play normal games where you work on waiting until the last second possible to hit minions. It will be uncomfortable and you will miss a lot, but you will get a better idea on when to hit the minions. Break it down even further and just do repetition in bot or custom games with certain drills. The key is that repetition. Keep doing it and don’t stop until you get to where you want.

2. Weakness: Vision and map awareness

Make goals for wards placed. Watch pro ward placements or guides to understand where to put them so the ward placed stat is not a worthless number. Watch replays and watch the vision in the game and note times you could have improved vision or times you bought a pink ward, but didn’t. Come up with ways to ensure you fix that next time.

Have a buzzer on your phone or computer go off every 6–10 seconds that’s a reminder to look at your minimap. Try to pay attention to who is missing and guess where they could be. Watch the replays to see if you died because you didn’t notice someone could be where you were and you were extended to far. Make goals for how many times you stop extending or didn’t chase as a result of being accurately aware. Make a goal that you want to lower for how many times you die or get caught because of bad map awareness.

The Real Trick: Repeated for Emphasis

You actually need to do it, and keep doing it. Identifying your weakness and understanding how to fix it is not really much different than reading a few guides, going, “oh, that’s a great idea, I am going to try that”, keeping it in mind for a couple games, and then forgetting it all together. Maybe you make a small improvement, but you aren’t going to continue to climb unless you stick to an improvement plan. How well you identify and understand how to fix your weaknesses will determine how effective that improvement plan is, but anything is better than nothing if you actually do it and stick to it.

In The End

While you work to improve, you may start losing more than you are winning. Don’t panic. If working on your weaknesses lowers your level of play too significantly, play normals. In the end, you may have to take one step back before you can take two steps forward. Just keep grinding and eventually that climb won’t feel as steep.

Now go eat your heart out with those juicy “One trick I used to climb from Silver to Plat” posts on Reddit, just don’t forget the real reason pro’s are better than you, they consistently put in the work to improve.