Is it better not to win early matches to get good items?

its pretty good for late game comp like blademasters sorcerers or nobles that needed and spatulas but if youre going to play brawlers or knights or even shapeshifters, you dont need rare items and can do well with defensive left-over items, so its better to stay on top.

It can be worth it, but you set yourself behind in health you might need to rely on to finish your comp. This is especially important with a comp such as nobles, where you suck for mid-game, before you have full nobles and after t1 nobles isn't enough to let you autowin.

You also lose out on winstreak gold for that, which can be pretty damn important.

If that's how you feel, then in the beginning try to save up pairs of champs in bench while putting some 1star out there that allows you to lose first 3 rounds without losing too much health (I usually go one scrub at corner and 2 sin to take out 1 or 2 enemies before all of them die, causing me to only lose 2~3hp).

After you pick desired item during first carousel you can then combine benched ones into a few 2 stars and make ur comp from there.

Only if you need

Try not too int too much of your hp away tho, throw in a strong unit or two to mitigate the damage to your HP.

If you have a good winstreak and dont burn loads of gold winning early pays off. If your win lots but have no no streaks it wasnt worth spending extra money too win more early.

People who are winning sometimes spend so much gold maintaining their streak they lose money. The hp loss from a narrow defeat midgame when you are high hp isnt really significant and you can spend more than you get from maintaining a winstreak easily.

I rarely see the people who start out with 100 win tbh. They do well for the first half, and then everyone else destroys them as soon as their comps are built. The only way I see 1st places winning through is when RNGesus visits them and they get all the perfect shops so they can build their comp out of luck and still ahve gold to level easily.