The Silver Perspective: How to Climb Elo in League of Legends

Hello, my name is Matthew Parrish and I am currently ranked Silver III in League of Legends. My ign is Kurumu Kurono and here is a link to my summoner profile. I have been playing League since the end of season 4 and silver III is the highest rank I have ever been. Currently, I main jungle and adc and my favorite champs are Hecarim and Miss Fortune. I have played on several intramural league of legends teams and coached the UVa collegiate team to a top 32 national finish in the most recent split. Now you know where I come from and what my experience is, I hope you will listen to what I have to say regardless of my Elo. There's a stigma in the league of legends community against low Elo players, even though half of the player base is actually in bronze, the lowest division. I know some of you will completely disregard anything I have to say simply because I'm lower Elo than you, but a lack in mechanical skill or in-game decision making does not mean that a lower Elo player doesn't understand how the game works. Here are my tips on how to climb in league of legends.

1. Warding: This is a mistake that many low Elo players make (including myself) that high Elo players all do automatically. Wards let you see where the enemies are or are not. Pretty obvious right? But this translates into so much more. If you know where the enemies are you can make better decisions about potential picks you can make, safe map rotations, and even things as simple as pushing your lane in a match-up (yes Tryndamere one-trick, always shoving your wave into tower isn't a good thing). On the opposite end, if you are using control wards and sweepers to deny enemy vision then they are more likely to make mistakes that you can capitalize on. Next time you're in a game screen-cap and compare the mini-maps to an LCS or even a high Elo game. You wonder why low Elo games are so bloody.

2. Last Hitting: Gold is what makes the League world go round and getting every cs you can is the most consistent way to get a lead. If you cs better than the rest of the people in your division, you will climb. 15 cs is equal to a kill, gold-wise. Yes there are other advantages to kills, they deny gold to the enemies and take away enemy map pressure but if you mess up the same happens to you. Being too aggressive can be a lot of players downfall. Don't go for a 50-50 when a full wave is about to crash into your tower. Get that guaranteed gold and then look for an opportunity. Use the wave to your advantage. Learning to control your minion wave will make you a much better player.

3. Objectives: You do know this game is an objective based game and not Team Deathmatch right? Objectives give global gold or buffs and change the layout of the map. A tower is almost always better than a kill and the same goes for dragons and baron. Play smart. Don't just go chasing after every single kill you can if there's a better play. If you're not using that gold you get from kills to take the objectives than the gold is actually worthless. Learn how to use your advantages through kills or csing to take objectives and your games with get infinitely faster and smoother. No more 60-minute clown fiestas, instead you'll have 25-minute low-death games that will have you feeling infinitely more confident about your skills.

4. The Grind: If you honestly believe that you are better than the other people in your division and that you belong in a higher one then there is only one way to get there and it is to just play game after game. League of Legends is a team-based game and even if you play perfectly every game (which you don't) then you will still lose some. This is especially more prevalent the closer you get to your "real" Elo. If you've ever seen a challenger player rank up a new account to challenger you seem them dominate all their lower Elo games and they climb rapidly but this grind starts to slow down the closer they get to high diamond and master. Dyrus just got his third account to Challenger this season and it took him almost 350 ranked games on that account to get there. Your teammates might lose some games for you and you might lose some games for your team. The only way to know where you truly belong is to have a big enough sample size that evens out all of the variables. You can't play 50 games and expect to be in your true Elo if you're climbing, it's just not going to happen. If you think you deserve a higher rank because you "play like *insert tier here* player" and you have 50 ranked games played then you're lying. You don't deserve it. You didn't grind out the games like everyone else in those divisions. No one starts out as a diamond. Everyone had to grind there at one point. So get out there and play some League and earn that rank you crave so much, and if after several hundred games you're "stuck" in an Elo than I have bad news for you. You're not stuck, you belong there.

These are just some of my thoughts on how to improve in league. I know I didn't inlcude everyting but what do you guys think? Agree? Disagree? Do you think Elo hell exists?