Back where I belong.

After a hard fought week, I was able to make it back to Diamond 1. I'm sitting at 18 points right now. I'm gaining and losing 3-5 points per game. So far, I've already played with 2 pro players that I've recognized, so I'm in good company.

A Challenger Series awaits me once I hit 100 points. If I win 3/5 games in the series, I will be promoted to Challenger, accompanied by 49 of the best players in the nation. I've also started streaming, but I've only been messing around, playing normal games (games that don't affect your ranking). You can check out my stream here! Basically, you can watch me play video games live.

But you guys probably don't care about my journey. So here's some tips that will help yours!

LoL Replay
If you don't mind downloading another program, and it doesn't affect your computer's performance, I highly recommend downloading LoL Replay. It allows you to watch every game you've played with the program on. This makes it incredibly easy to go back and see how you and your team performed. You can find what your team did right (or wrong), and it's very easy to find individual mistakes.

Admit your mistakes!
I'm sure I've said it several times since I started this blog. In fact, I mentioned it in the paragraph before this. But it's so important. No matter how good you are, you can always improve. This is an excuse I've heard across all rankings, from Bronze to Diamond: I would be higher ranked, but I always get bad teammates.
Sure, you'll have games where your team is absolutely useless. But you're teamed up with people around your MMR (match maker rating), so they're just as good as you. Next time you have bad team mates, think about all those times where you had bad games or just an off day. In the long run, you'll end up where you belong.

I wanted to find actual in-game aspects, but that's very difficult due to how dynamic each game can be. Every game is so unique and unstable that anything can happen. When a team is extremely far ahead and ends up losing, the term to describe the occasion is "throwing". If you threw a game, you lost it despite a huge advantage. I had a game a couple days ago where I played extremely well for the first 34 minutes of the game. However, the 35-minute game was decided by one poor decision by me in which I thought I could take their whole team alone. In my defense, I had previously 1v4'd and came out with 4 kills, so I was getting cocky (look at my last post!).

There's no exact strategy or method to winning games, as every situation is different. Sometimes, you just have to play consistently and make few mistakes. Other games can be won by making one big play, regardless of how poorly you were playing the rest of the game.

Good luck on your journey through Summoner's Rift!