I wish to answer the age old question of

"When should I start ranked?"

The truth of the matter is, you shouldn't wait.

It's true, if you have 300 normal games played and you start ranked you will not end up a very good player. You will most likely lose 5-7 of your placement matches depending on your skill and end up at 1100 elo or below.

If you're level-headed though you will understand that some players have over 3k games played and are still stuck at 1200. Generally these guys believe they're in elo hell and do nothing [...]

Hold onto your hat or it will be blown away by the new mobility meta coming your way. We've seen it coming for awhile with the amount of dashes and speed boosts being released but lately it's been hitting full force in high elo and if it hasn't already, it will hit you soon.

What is the mobility meta? It's pretty self explained but how does it relate to the majority of champions in the game? Well lately most junglers, solo tops, and solo mids have been running Movement Speed Quints as well as 0/21/9 or some variation (1/18/11 is pretty nice) and starting boots. This [...]

FYA Umashi:
You're one of the few professional gamers in the world and one of the more popular players in the world right now in all of professional gaming. When you first got into online gaming did you ever see this coming?

Dyrus:
No, I was just a hardcore gamer, never expected to be pro. I found league a lot easier to learn and be addicted to than other games and then I got invited to a gaming house to stream and now my career for that is jumpstarted.

FYA Umashi:
Do you enjoy the life of being a professional gamer? Did you have a dream job in [...]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYO0m_MHVzA&feature=youtu.be

Man, I need a better mic, I wish I had money.

This one actually turned out fairly well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=an5ckzkiTsw

So my most recent project, UELL, or "Umashi's Elo Learning Lessons" I find pretty enjoyable so I'm going to keep doing it and hopefully getting better at it with each one. I'm going to do two different types. I'm going to keep doing the ones like the last two I did, which were me with a guest caster who is 2k+ and focuses on a specific part of the game.

The games with co-casters shall be scheduled through sign-ups. If you already signed up on Reddit I've already recorded you so no need to sign-up again. I am looking for more sign ups though because I [...]

The second UELL. Same team, same caster because the first one had such awful sound issues.

But I still failed... I forgot to turn my webcam off. How stoopid!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVUniiMyhic

Umashi's Elo Learning Lesson is a program brought to you by me, FYA Umashi, to help players improve upon basic game mechanics that hold them down.

The idea behind it is that we take two low elo teams and then me and a high elo co-caster commentate on the two teams play. Viewers can relate to the players in the game and we can give advice to relate to the situation. This allows players to improve on a widespread level, instead of one at a time.

This specific episode features jungling with co-caster TooLeegitToQuit who is a 2200 Elo Jungler.

I'd like to [...]

EDIT - I read through the comments and I do see what people mean. They're arguing the math so I'll clean that up so they can stop arguing the math and instead argue the true point of this blog, what it takes to increase your elo (and therefore your skill) which is being able to do well consistently. Otherwise you just bring your team down when you have good teammates and they bring you down when you're doing good. A lot of people are always talking about how the Elo system needs a fix because it clearly doesn't work. It's not that it doesn't work though, it's just [...]

Guardsman Bob was my own role model when I was in low elo. I was one of those people who would think a game is over just because of certain picks (that are perfectly viable in-fact, just not common). I would put my team down by saying "GG" whenever something bad happened and I would respond to everything anybody said to me. Now at lower elo's responding to what people say and saying a game is over just because of picks are very common. The "GG" thing happens a lot but it's a lot more common around 1600+.

The thing about this is that if you're [...]