Why do you feel trapped in ranked?

**Because you are. **

Understand this first: there is no way to guarantee a victory in League of Legends. Your skill, relative to the average skill of the division in which you're playing, increases your percentile chance of winning, but it doesn't guarantee anything.

A Challenger player in Bronze? Yeah, he's almost certainly going to win. Let's say 95% winrate. Maybe it's 99%. Maybe it's 99.99%. Doesn't matter; it's close to 100%. But as he gets closer to Challenger, that winrate is going to drop. That's common sense, right? Maybe his winrate is still insanely high vs. Plat players. Maybe it's 80%. But it's still reduced. That's because the closer you get to your TRUE ranking, the less the differential in skill between you and your opponents, and the less you contribute to your teams chance of victory.

The ranking system, at its most basic level, translates your winrate at your current division into a promotion to the next division, then repeats. Following me so far? If you have a 100% winrate, you will rise insanely quickly. If you have an 80% winrate, you will still rise quickly, but not as fast. If you have a 55% winrate, you will rise very, very slowly.

As your ranking approaches your TRUE ranking, your winrate approaches 50%. It won't actually get there until you are actually placed correctly. But it will get close enough to 50% that the number of games required for your marginal advantage to be rewarded via promotion becomes large. Very, very large.

Rising through the divisions when you are ranked way below your true ranking is a simple contest, a demonstration of skill: I am better than these players, therefore I beat them most of the time, therefore I get promoted. You can jump divisions in a handful of games. But when your winrate enters the 55% range, the nature of what is being tested changes due to the sheer amount of games that have to be played to advance. It becomes a matter of grinding out hundreds and hundreds of games, while consistently playing at the same skill level. It becomes a test not of ability, but of endurance.

Defenders of the ranked system will at this point claim that if you were actually any better than your current division, you would have a much higher winrate than 55%. That's simply not the case. Due to how gold distribution works, due to the nature of the game and the extent to which it is team-dependent, an individual player can be substantially, measurably better than everyone else in the game and yet powerless to win.

This is true in any division, but it is especially true in Bronze and Silver, because the gap in player skill is so vast. Bronze and Silver comprises the vast majority of the players of this game. Statistically, the difference between the best and the worst of Silver alone is as substantial as the gap between Gold and Diamond. That means that more than any other division, the skill level of your team and the opponents team, and therefore the outcome of the game, is random.

A great explanation of this from a Diamond player: So I've been playing on a Silver account recently since I got my main account to Diamond for the season and I'm really shocked at how difficult Silver elo is. The games are really inconsistent as far as team work and people knowing what to do. Some players feel like they know exactly what to do and lane / last hit really well and I'm surprised they're in silver, and then there's others that I'm shocked have even made it this far. ... I was a little embarassed about the struggle here so I mentioned it in a group and a bunch of other Diamond / Master level players were having the same issues. I felt a little relieved to find that out but at the same time, it makes me wonder about skill in this game when players that have consistently proven themselves to be able to play at a high level struggle at this low of an elo.

A statistical advantage remains a statistical advantage despite high variance. But the larger the variance, the larger the series has to be in order for the statistical advantage to become apparent. I know I just threw a pretty dense sentence at you, so let me give you a simple math example to show you why that's true. Let's say you run an RNG with a range of 1-5, and you always add 1. Okay? The average result 1-5 is 3, YOUR average result will be 4 (because you add 1). How long will it take for that advantage to be obvious? Not long, right? A series of 10 rolls will probably already show a strong advantage. Now how about an RNG 1-100? Same as before, you get +1. Average result is 50.5. YOUR average result is 51.5. So just as before, on a long enough series you will always be 1 higher than the average. But how many rolls would it take for that advantage to show itself? Thousands?

Exactly.

Remember what I said before about how when you get close to your true skill level, the number of games required to advance become much, much greater? Well, if the range just below your true ranking happens to fall in bronze or silver, a range in which the skill variance is dramatically higher, that already large number becomes multiplicatively larger. We aren't talking about hundreds any more, we're talking about thousands.

There are 3 types of Gold players:

• The ones who actually play at a Plat+ skill level, who can advance through Silver much more easily.
• The ones who played massive numbers of games and grinded their way out of Silver.
• The ones who went on a winstreak and lucked their way out of Silver.

Nobody whose true ranking is Gold gets out of silver without grinding or getting lucky. That's why you feel trapped. That's why you are trapped. That's what Elo hell is.