How to get out of elo hell (and why it isn't what you think)

Every game you get four random teammates and five random opponents. In one game, chance decides almost everything; across a hundred, the bad teammates you get are statistically the same ones your opponents get. What is left over the long run is what you bring.

This is not a scolding, it is good news. If it really were the teammates there would be nothing to do about it. Since it isn't, there is something to do.

**Play few champions.** Someone playing twenty knows twenty matchups halfway; someone playing three knows all three completely, and in those three they know what to do at minute eight without thinking. The gain here is immediate and requires no talent.

**Stop when you're losing.** Two losses in a row change how you play the third — more risk, less patience. The rule "two down, done for today" is worth more than any technical tip, and almost nobody applies it.

**Watch your own deaths.** Not full games: the deaths. Replay the ten seconds before each one and ask "where did I think their jungler was". Most losses at low and mid ranks start there, not in a teamfight.

**Switching role to climb faster.** It moves the problem: you start learning matchups from scratch, with the added frustration of having gone backwards.

**Playing more.** Volume without change multiplies what you already do, mistakes included. Twenty games played badly teach less than five games reviewed.

A boost moves the rank, not the level of play. If the problem is that you are stuck below the rank you would actually hold — it happens, especially after a bad season or on a new account — a boost puts you back where you are, and from there you carry on.

If instead the problem is that you don't know what you are doing wrong, a boost will not fix it and you will drift back to where you are now. What fixes that is an hour of coaching with someone who watches your games and tells you, in full, why those deaths happened. It costs less than a boost and it lasts longer.