We all reach that point where we ask, “What’s holding me back?” And when it comes to League, we have a lot of factors to point at to deflect from ourselves. “That Champ is broken!” or “My team is holding me back!” are common phrases that detract from the common denominator in every single game, you.

So, let’s talk about the top reasons you’re holding yourself back from climbing and offer solutions on how to overcome these issues and make it to the next rank!

Result Oriented Thinking Is Literally Weighing You Down

Result Oriented Thinking, as the name implies, cares only for results. So, regardless of however you played, what Champion you played, how well your teammates did or didn’t do, it doesn’t matter to you as long as you get that juicy W and those League Points.

And though winning is important, what’s more important is queuing into ranked with the mindset of improvement over winning. Why? Well, result focused mindsets often drift us away from critically thinking about our games. We care only for the end result, and if we perceive something to be bogging us down in between us and that goal, we often cast aside what we can be doing to get to that result we care about. We auto-pilot. We tilt. We focus on the barriers instead of a plan of action. Excuses start to rise the buzzwords of, “broken”, “diff”, and “gapped” start getting tossed towards our team, and we slowly start to unravel not only our own mental, but that of our teams as well.

Critically thinking about our games and focusing on improvement is hard, but if you consistently encourage yourself to focus on what you as a individual could be doing to overcome even the feediest of situations that Solo-Queue offers you, when the situations become not-so-feedy, you’re going to be able to easily enter that ‘flow state’ and outperform your opponents both microly and macroly.

And no, the ‘flow state’ isn’t the same as auto-piloting. Auto-piloting is relying on muscle memory alone while focusing only on what’s in front of you. Whereas the ‘flow state’ is an all-encompassing mindset, one where you are aware of both yourself, your team, and the enemy team. The game and your Champion becomes an extension of you, and you’re able to exert your will over it with ease during this state, while auto-piloting is simply just preventing you from drowning.

How do we break the result focused mindset though? Encouragement and a dedication to education. Simply reminding yourself when things start to go astray in game is a start, and then following that ‘bad’ game up with a VOD review or education session on Youtube or here in our blogs can start gearing you into that proper mindset. Simply making the effort is the start, and before you even know it, it’ll become second nature to you.

You’re Chatting Too Much In Game

When we’re looking for improvement, we’re not talking about the latest happenings in the LCS, flaming our Support Darius, or talking about the latest patch notes in Draft, we’re gearing ourselves for a focused 45 minute class session. And just like in the classroom setting in school, there’s no talking over the teacher. And in our environment, the Rift is the teacher and we its students. So, we’re focused on the lesson instead of writing notes and whispering to our team.

Why? Well, even if you’re trying to help your team with builds or Champion choices, it’s really on them to have done their homework and studied before class. Your job is to come in and be a good student. Not carry the class discussion. So, I highly suggest turning off the in-game chat via your settings. This does not get rid of allied pings, but instead trims your chat box to instead be a cube of potential distraction to one of pure information. And this setting also prevents you from slipping into unfocused ways yourself. You can’t communicate how much you hate your Top Lane Yuumi when the client literally won’t let you type to them, right?

And while you’re at it, take out the enemy team’s communication to your too. Why do you even need to All-Chat when your goal is to trounce the person across from you anyway? Yeah, there’s a potential psychological game to play there, but that’s just a bait strategy to distract your fingers and mind away from the Summoner’s Rift Masterclass.

The Off Meta is Blocking You

(Featured above is me and my best friend, Chris, playing AP Twitch and MF Support.)

Unless you’ve devoted your heart and soul to AP Tryndamere and know its ins and outs better than you know the back of your own hand, you’re likely stunting your potential growth and climb. Off-Meta Builds, Champions, and Lane Assignments aren’t the optimal way to climb. Often times these playstyles come with some inherent weakness that makes them more difficult to execute than their counterparts which is why they’re considered ‘Off-Meta’ in the first place.

And though you can master these approaches so much so that they’re as easily executed to you as they are to the Meta ways, oftentimes this barrier to entry is one that is so high that it could take MANY patches for you to master to the point of relevancy. And then you always run the risk of balance updates sliding an already precarious playstyle even further out of favor.

Further your approach also always runs the risk of not complimenting the Meta that your teammates might be playing or, even worse, is so off-meta that it tilts them away from a focused mindset. Often times players that come into ranked have preconceived notions about how the game is ‘supposed’ to be played. And if you diverge from that standard meta of play, you can cause a loss before first blood alone by playing an off-meta style.

Yes. Miss Fortune Support is low-key amazing and more people should play it, but if your three game loss-streak Kai’sa isn’t expecting it, she’s probably going to just implode and flame you and the Rift until Riot’s servers literally catch fire. So, play more ‘optimal’ builds, Champions, and assignments in Ranked. You don’t need to fit the composition at hand (though that helps), you simply just need to be playing your best at their best to save the mental, the struggle, and more than likely come out ahead.

You’re Not Taking Advantage of Third Party Sites like Porofessor, OP.GG, and U.GG

These websites are INVALUABLE to those that are truly seeking to climb. Professor and OP.GG offer quick glimpses of your teammates' match history and main roles from a simple copy-past. You can see if they’re playing their main Champions, or bumbling around on a Champion from the first time from these tools to.

U.GG offers a great way to track your progress, but also compiles the most popular builds across all regions and ranks to give you the most powerful builds in terms of both item paths and ability maxes. To top it off, you can look directly at what the professional players are building themselves and see if that aligns with what the community at large is building. The pros might run counter culture sometimes, but they do some from a position of skill and education that the community might be lacking.

Your Ranked Sessions Are Far Too Long

We all fall into the trap of, “Gotta end on a win!” And that trap will cost you more than just getting to bed on time. In our case it distracts us from that improvement mindset that we mentioned earlier, and doesn’t help set us into a rhythm for success. Cramming the night before a test isn’t the way to make an A+, afterall. And with our goals, extending our League session beyond our mental strength and goals isn’t going to help us establish good habits and help us climb.

So, what does the perfect League session look like? Well, in my eyes the perfect session is a Best-Of 3 or 5 games a day, depending on how much time you have. And why this amount? Well, with this format, you don’t commit yourself too hard and fast to multiple losses in a row. And you set a hard parameter where you gear your mind towards being focused on improvement the entire time.

So, we work within that improvement mindset and result mindset in duality here. We set a hard stop to allow for study and improvement while also not plunging down a soft-tilted session that causes us to drop tier after tier. After all, though we aim to improve ourselves first, we don’t want to harm our ability to climb and affect the MMR system by needlessly losing games. Which casually leads us into our last point…

You’re Not Playing the MMR Game Correctly

The game within the game is not one that’s mental, but it’s one that’s mathematical and governed by Riot directly. So, for those of you unaware, I’ll break it down quickly.

The MMR is system is a hidden rating system that governs how you are matched when you queue up for a game of League. It also governs the amount of LP you gain for every win, and the amount you lose at every loss. Eventually, your MMR flattens once you begin to stall in the amount of games you win compared to the amount that you lose. This flattening reduces the LP all around from both wins and losses as the system believes it has ‘found’ where you belong in terms of skill. And this flattening can be frustrating since it requires a heavy amount of games won vs. lost to unflatten the gains. 

So, to avoid this very situation, we set parameters for our playtime to avoid heavy dips into the red in terms of both LP and MMR. Our focus on improvement will naturally lead us to wins to help correct any incurred losses, but we still have to play this system a bit more bluntly than you’d expect to be able to keep our climb extremely accessible.

Another way to manipulate the system to our advantage though is through effective dodging. Dodging games may equal out in an LP loss plus a timer, but what it doesn’t do is affect your MMR. Only direct losses and victories do. So, if we have a lobby where we’ve come face to face with the infamous “Mid or Feed” that gets autofilled Support, or by using one of the previously mentioned third party sites, we see that multiple members are off-roled, we can cleanly dodge the lobby. Saving both our MMR, LP, and mental strength for the next lobby.